Getting Warmer
by eiluned price
Summary: After their honeymoon on Isle Esme, Bella gets to spend more time being human with Edward as they travel cross-country to New Hampshire and beyond, and learn about art, love and temperature differentials. AU. BxE. Newlyweds being newlyweds, so lemons.
1. Chapter 1: GIG

_Disclaimer: Render unto Stephenie Meyer what is Stephenie Meyer's. Which is all this.\_

_"Getting Warmer" is up for fic of the week at The Lemonade Stand, thanks to Melissa Duncan Jones. Link on my profile page, or head over to the tehlemonadestand._

* * *

Prologue

The gray car crossed the serene Connecticut River into Vermont. It was October, a gray day that matched the car, but the red and orange leaves on the hardwoods looked vibrant under the clouds, a different beauty than on a sunny day. It was beautiful, and new to my eyes. I had seen one fall on the Olympic Peninsula, but I couldn't remember it.

The man driving next to me was also beautiful, and also felt new to my eyes. He had one hand resting on the steering wheel, the other cooling my thigh, yet still warming me. His voice was impossibly rich, hinting at tones I couldn't detect. I knew if I leaned a little closer to him that I'd breathe in his wonderful scent. As we turned south on Route 5, I did just that.

We were on the most banal of errands. We were going grocery shopping. I was going into sensory overload. His face had that expression of peace that it wore when only his thoughts were in his head, but when he turned to me he froze.

"What's wrong?"

I couldn't answer him. I was, I suddenly realized, shaking. I felt as if I was stepping into a whirlwind, a tornado, the second circle of the Inferno.

It was so much. It was too much.

The car stopped on the empty road. My door opened, my seatbelt vanished, and he was on his knees pulling me to him. "What's wrong?"

The arms around me eased my shaking, the closeness helped me breathe. "I don't know… It's nothing," I mumbled. "Stupid hyperventilating. I'm fine. Nothing's wrong."

I hoped I wasn't lying.

* * *

Chapter 1: GIG

"C'mon, Dad," I said with exasperation. "You really need to learn how to cook. You're a strong, independent man. Or you could be."

I was back in Charlie's little house, for my last day in Forks before heading East to college. I'd decided to spend the time with my father while Edward went out hunting, and since conversation with Charlie was usually desultory, I thought making some dishes I could freeze for him would help pass the time. I had dragged him with me to the supermarket, and then we spent the afternoon in the warm yellow kitchen, Charlie in his oldest plaid shirt hanging out while I cooked, talking about work – the drunken driving, petty vandalism, rumored meth labs of a small town. It was more pleasant than I expected.

"Nah, I'll just guilt another woman into cooking for me," he said, almost making me cut myself as I sliced celery for chicken soup. He was joking. This was a nice change. And it gave me an opening.

"Okay, I can see that, but what are you going to eat if Sue Clearwater breaks up with you?" I said as I chopped.

"Huh?" he grunted, his face coloring. That damn blush ran in the family.

"It's pretty obvious, Dad."

"Hmpf," he replied. "You look tired."

I blushed in turn, though I'd lived with Charlie long enough to know that he probably wasn't making a veiled allusion to my honeymoon. Probably. I'd told him a little about Isle Esme, but I'd made it sound more like a resort. The Cullens didn't need word going around Forks that they owned an island.

"Jet lag," I said. "Rio is four hours ahead of here." I hoped he wouldn't think too much about the logic of that sentence.

He didn't answer, and I let my mind wander as I stirred the soup. The last few weeks had been blissful, and our time on the island had been perfect after our initial ... hiccup. I thought fondly back to the dream that had changed everything, and that we had re-enacted later, on the beach itself this time, in part to give Esme's furniture and bedding a respite; before we left Edward had had to arrange with Gustavo, the caretaker, to oversee the installation of a bed to replace the one we had destroyed.

There had been one odd event, near the end of our stay. We had been preparing to take a break from our, um, usual activities to go swimming - well, I was going to mostly loll on the beach while Edward let loose his strength in the water – when he heard a boat pulling up to the pier. A few minutes later, a timid knock sounded, and Edward ushered in Gustavo's partner, Kaure. She was carrying a big casserole, and even though it was cold, I got a whiff of a wonderful smell, a mixture of onions and fish.

"Why is she here?" I whispered to Edward as she put the dish into the refrigerator.

"She came by to offer us dinner, she says, but she's really checking up on you, to make sure that I haven't done away with you yet," he said, unconcerned. A couple of weeks of proof that he wouldn't kill me had certainly relaxed him.

"That's great. You won't have to cook tonight," I said happily. "How do you say 'gracias' in Portuguese?"

"Obrigada will do," he answered, and I called out, "Obrigada, Kaure."

She said something back, presumably, "You're welcome," but her voice seemed tense and her eyes lingered on the loose white shift that I'd tossed over my navy bikini in hopes of avoiding sunburn. Something that she was thinking caught Edward's attention. He started questioning her casually, but I could hear an edge to his voice.

Their conversation started in Portuguese, but Kaure seemed wary of Edward's queries, so he shifted to a more guttural, harsher language - Edward knew Ticuna? The change and Edward's natural persuasive powers had their effect, and soon Kaure was talking easily. To my surprise I heard the word "libishomen," and I wondered why Edward would want to bring that up, with Kaure already so suspicious of him. She looked at me occasionally, and I smiled at her in hopes of easing her mind - after all, she was awfully brave to come here by herself and risk the wrath of a vampire.

After several minutes, I heard Edward say, "Obrigado" and Kaure gave him a smile. She waved to me and called out something, then made her way out of the house.

"What was that all about?" I asked.

Edward hesitated before he replied. "Kaure was thinking about a part of the libishomen legend I had never heard before, something she was told in Colombia - you remember the beautiful women they prey upon? Apparently sometimes the women survive long enough to ... have children."

That was a chilling thought.

He went on, "I told her that you were an anthropology student and would find this fascinating, and that's why she was willing to talk. But she really doesn't know that much about it, and since the libishomen story is so inaccurate in many respects, I imagine this part of it too has no basis in reality, or maybe even mythology. It's just not possible."

I knew this, because we had discussed it already - I had been astonished to learn that changes wrought by venom meant that Edward had a different genetic makeup from me. Explaining all this to me one night before the wedding, he had also told me about Rosalie's efforts to find out if there was a way she and Emmett could have a child without running afoul of the Volturi, her hopes rising with every advance in reproductive science and story about Baby Louise and even Dolly the cloned sheep. "She experimented with fertilization with donated human eggs," Edward recalled, "though Carlisle and I pointed out the highly dubious ethics involved with using a surrogate human mother.

"In any case, it didn't work, despite Emmett's manly offerings, and when genetic testing became sophisticated enough, Carlisle was able to demonstrate why. Rosalie was especially difficult to be with for a long time after that."

Poor Jasper, I had thought.

More immediately, I suspected there was more to Kaure's legend than Edward was telling me, but I could also tell that he wouldn't tell me even if I pushed, and I was in too good of a mood to try.

"You scared me there for a moment," I said with a grin. "When I have dinner, I'll see if Kaure's cooking was worth having to hear her stories."

Several days later, we headed back to Forks. I was disappointed that we didn't spend any time in Rio - pretty much all I saw was the blaze of lights from the favelas at night as we drove to the airport - but Edward promised we could come back later; his memories being told while he was in the city I had died remained too fresh, he said, for him to enjoy watching me discover it now.

The gray skies and cool breezes of Seattle were a shock after the sunshine of the island, but probably mild compared with winter in New Hampshire. For the first time in my life, I would be somewhere that got seriously cold. With my cold husband.

It was fantastic to see all the Cullens again. I was overwhelmed by the love I felt rushing toward us as Edward and I stepped out of the Volvo. I got enthusiastic if careful hugs from them all – even Rosalie.

"You look fabulous," she whispered to me as I gaped at her, "and my brother looks … amazing. I have never seen him so happy. Thank you."

I was so flabbergasted I couldn't respond, but I was distracted from my embarrassment over my speechlessness by, of course, Emmett.

"Bella!" he boomed. "You made it out alive! Now I have to pay Jasper $300, so you owe me."

Of course, Emmett would bet on my demise. "And how would I have paid back Jasper?" I asked him coolly.

"Seriously, Bella, you know I was making the bet as a good-luck charm," he said, leaning down to kiss the top of my head.

"Yeah, I know," I admitted. "But you don't have to be such a jerk about it."

"Jerk in 1935, jerk today."

The siblings had another reason to be excited: the plan was for us to take our cars to Dartmouth, though not all together. Alice, Jasper, Emmett and Rosalie would be racing one another, while Edward and I would trail behind in the Volvo - "you'd probably want to eat and sleep in a bed occasionally," he noted - and meet them in New York. Esme and Carlisle were staying behind in Forks to keep up appearances.

But as wonderful as it was to be with my new family, and as shocked as I was by Rosalie's welcome, I was worried as I went upstairs to Edward's room - our room, now - to change out of my travel-rumpled clothes. The privacy on the island had been perfect; now I was in a house full of vampires with such acute hearing that they could probably hear me peel off my socks on the third floor. Emmett had already made some remarks that turned my cheeks red after I thanked Esme for lending us her island; I hoped Edward could explain the necessary redecorating to her sometime when Emmett was many, many miles away.

Could I remain absolutely silent with Edward? I doubted it. And I doubted that Edward would bother - why should he? He had spent decades overhearing his family.

I sighed in defeat and went down to the kitchen. Carlisle had picked up takeout for the human, and I was hungry. Esme and Edward kept me company while I ate, and she quizzed us about the state of the house and the island flora; she knew down to the last detail where certain trees and orchids were, some of them very rare. I was on edge for the entire conversation, but Edward didn't mention the bed and I silently blessed him, for I knew that Emmett was next door in the living room.

In fact, the whole family seemed to be … waiting in there, I realized as I washed the dishes I'd used. "Bella?" Alice called out, excitement obvious in her voice. "Could we see you a moment?"

"What's going on?" I asked Edward with suspicion.

"Um, they have something …." he started, then rushed on when he saw my face, "something for us," he emphasized the last word. "So you can't complain," he concluded.

Alice came in then, and grabbed my wrist. "Come on, Pokey," she said, dragging me into the other room, Edward following.

Carlisle greeted me with a smile. "We do have a wedding present for the two of you," he said. I suppressed my sigh; I really was being needlessly ungracious about all this.

"Okay …" I started, hesitantly, because I couldn't see anything in the room that could possibly be meant for us, but Alice cut me off. She danced in front of me, dangling a key from a red ribbon. "And I'm going to show it to you,'' she announced. "But we'll have to run."

It must be in the woods somewhere, I thought with confusion. "Okay…" I said again.

"Come on," she said impatiently, grasping my wrist again, "hop on my back."

"I'll do that part," Edward cut in.

"You'll let her look."

"She won't see. It's too dark."

"That's true," Alice conceded. The moon was barely a sliver. Edward took my wrist from her, but then he stopped to flash a brilliant smile at his family.

"This is incredibly thoughtful of you, and I'll - we'll - never be able to thank you enough," he said fervently. Esme beamed back at him. Maybe his graciousness would make up for my lack of it.

Edward got me my jacket and led me out the back window wall and onto the lawn before slinging me across his back, Alice at his side. They flew to the river edge, then leapt across; my breath caught even though I knew I was perfectly safe wrapped around Edward. We made our swift way through the black forest for a few minutes before I could sense that Edward was coming to a stop. They could see something in the dark ahead that was hidden to my eyes.

Edward let me slide off his back, then took my hand to lead me forward. My feet hit a smooth stone, then another - it was a walkway, I realized - and then I could make out the outline of a little house.

"Oh," I whispered, "this is our present?"

"Yes," Alice said smugly, clasping the key to my palm. "Do you like it?"

I stared at the house, my eyes adjusting to allow me to see more details. It was stone, with a little arched doorway, and there was a tiny garden in front.

"I'm sure I will, once I see it in daylight," I told her. "This is so generous of you. Please give everyone my thanks," I added, remembering my vow to be nicer about these things.

"Sure," she answered, giving me a peck on the cheek. "Bye!" And then she was gone. I looked in confusion in the direction I thought she had gone in, and Edward laughed.

"Wow, she was in a hurry," I said.

"She didn't want to delay our using the house," he said. Then, seeing my continued bewilderment, he explained, "Privacy is their other gift to us."

Relief swept through me when that sunk in. Yes, the best gift of all, I thought, remembering my worries earlier. I smiled up at Edward. "Show me around?" I asked. He grinned as I opened the door with my new key and then swept me up to carry me in.

It was an incredibly charming house, I thought, noting the fireplace in the living room, driftwood already burning in it, and the wrought-iron daybed that served as a sofa. There was no kitchen and no heating system - after all, it was unlikely we'd have many non-vampire visitors here - but there was a generously sized bathroom.

The bedroom was a replica of the white room on the island, with its huge bed and French doors that Edward said opened onto a little pool. He warned me that Alice had persuaded Esme to put in an enormous closet, but I barely heard him as he carried me into the bedroom, because his lips were so close to my ear that his breath was washing over me, driving out any other thoughts. I turned my head so I could meet his lips with mine, and he could tell that I couldn't care less at that moment about what Alice had done.

He sat me down on the edge of the huge white bed so I could kick my shoes off. He followed suit, then did that thing where I was lying on my back, he was hovering over me shirtless, and I couldn't figure out how all this had happened. Not that I minded. Not when it had been an incredibly long stretch of hours since we were able to really touch each other. Not when his cool lips were on my earlobe, then my jaw, then my throat, then my collarbone. Those lips moved up to my own, and I was only vaguely aware that the buttons on my shirt were disappearing. His hand slid under the fabric of my bra to cup my breast and –

_Crap_, that was cold. My choked-off moan and recoil took me by surprise, and Edward swore under his breath and then he was sitting up.

"Don't move," he whispered, and pulled the linen-covered comforter over me before disappearing. Crap, I thought again. I miss Isle Esme and oppressive humidity and sweat. We hadn't really thought about what delaying my change for college and returning above the 40th parallel would mean for our sex life.

I decided to shuck my blouse and jeans for the sake of expedience, tossing them on the floor and watching them slide inconveniently under a dresser. Faint noises came from the front of the house, and after several minutes Edward was back at the side of the bed, gorgeous and naked, snatching me up, comforter and all. He carried me into the living room, and I could see that he had placed the mattress from the daybed between the fireplace and a huge space heater.

"Fantastic," I breathed as he placed me gently on the mattress, and adjusted the comforter so it covered us both. I could feel heat blowing on me on two sides, and when Edward returned to hover over me again, one of his strong legs between mine, I put my hand on his chest. It was warmer now too. "Did you jump in the fire? Or lie on the space heater?" I asked.

"The latter, or rather, the space heater was lying on me. Let's take advantage of my warmth while it lasts, shall we?"

"Mmm," I agreed, and I gasped for a different reason this time when his hand slipped inside my bra again.

"Ah, my warm-blooded wife, how will we keep you that way?" he murmured. He easily pulled my bra apart, freeing my breasts so he could palm them with his warmed hands, twirl his fingers around the hardened nipples. A pulse thrummed in my sex even though his hands weren't anywhere close. I brought up my own hands to flick at his nipples; they were like stone, and Edward hissed and flipped me to my side so that my back was pressed against his chest and his fingers could roam freely along my front.

"A space heater seems useful," I mumbled as he drew a line with the pad of his index finger from my throat down to my belly button.

"I approve of the way you spent your time while I was getting acquainted with the heater here," he said before taking some minutes to kiss my bare back. "What else?" he finally asked.

"Huh?" I'd lost track of the conversation.

"Heat."

"Oh. Fireplaces and … hot showers?" I arched as he traced the underside of my breasts.

"Mmmm?"

"Jacuzzis. Saunas. Hot-water bottles. Electric … ah," I said incoherently. His fingers were running under my panties and through my hair there, and I squirmed against them. They disappeared for a second, and so did my underwear, and then they were back, spreading my wetness, building pressure in my belly, shortening my breaths. "Oh," I moaned, feeling his thrust between my thighs.

"Bella, love, can we try this?" Edward said from behind me. He removed his hand to push me gently forward a bit, lifting my left leg easily, opening me to his slow push. He paused partway in, constricted, then withdrew slowly, gathering, causing, the lubrication that eased his way back in and deeper. I flattened my palms through the comforter against the fireplace apron to gain leverage, and Edward grunted as I pushed against him. We moved in perfect coordination for a while until he could get settled in me.

"How is that for you?" he asked, his exhalation spreading deliciously along my back, sending a thrill along my skin.

"It's heavenly…" I answered. I could feel him trembling. "Are you okay?"

"Can you stay still for me?" he asked, his voice tense. "I'm going to be too fast this way…" He moved his hand back to my clit. "I can make you feel good like this …God, I can feel the vibrations of your clit on my cock, you're so warm, you're ... throbbing …" His words and his movements made me groan, which made his fingers more decisive, more urgent, the pleasure and the sensation more intense, rising.

"That feels so good," I said inadequately, and the pressure spiraled up and around. The urge was overwhelming to brace my hands and pound against him, and I choked out, "I have to …" just as he made me hit a peak and I pushed off the bricks and slammed my hips back to him. Again. Again. "Go," I pleaded. "Let go."

He let out a snarl and thrust forward to meet me. "Yes," he grunted with our now disjointed rhythm, as I tightened around him, my cries loud, and he pulsed into me. I collapsed under him, and he held me, keeping me together, as our panting slowly subsided. Then we were silent for a long while, save for his unintelligible murmurs and soft kisses against my shoulders, and he finally pulled away and I could turn toward him, pressing my cheek to his chest and draping an arm over his torso.

I noted that no comforters were harmed in the making of this rather dirty movie.

"This seems to be pretty easy for you now," I said eventually, moving my face away from his chest and waving my hand above our entwined bodies.

"No."

"But easier?"

"Yes."

There was a pause. I could feel the heat from the fire on my back. I could hear the humming of the space heater.

"Hmm. I have a question about, um, physiology," I ventured.

"Of course," he said, grinning. I reddened, and once again marveled at how my nearly Victorian-era husband could be so much more comfortable, so much more modern, about these matters than his 21st-century wife. Well, apart from the objection to premarital … anything.

"So - you're very careful about your venom getting on me, and I understand why. Though I must say, I'm looking forward to someday getting to first base with my husband," I started.

He laughed. "I am, too."

"Okay. But how do you know that your, uh, semen is safe for me?" I asked. "I mean, I know it must be, or we wouldn't be doing this, but how did you figure it out?"

He slid his fingers into my hair and rubbed my scalp gently for a few moments to relax me. It helped. "Well, for one thing," he answered, "the men of Alaska are hale and hearty despite their unholy congress with our cousins in Denali."

"That's not the same thing, is it?"

"No, but it shows that our fluids aren't all dangerous. And you recall how when the newborn bit Jasper, the venom stung?"

I nodded, remembering only too well.

"Semen doesn't do that to us, nor does it do that to mammals. We did a bit of animal testing – "

"_What?_" I nearly shouted. "Animal testing?"

"Don't tell PETA," he said slyly. "And don't worry – they were fine. Really," he said, as I buried my face in his chest. "They all hopped away." I groaned.

He was silent for a few moments, then went on, "Do you want to hear the rest?"

"God help me, I guess I must."

"You know the legend of the incubus, right? It may sound like a convenient cover-up for infidelity, but it is true, in some respects at least. It's just that the women don't survive" — he raised his hand to stop the question he knew I would ask— "but that's because they're killed in the normal way, not because the semen hurts them."

"Normal way?"

"Inevitable may be the better adjective..." He stopped when I stared at him in disapproval. "All right. The usual way. Of course, that's all inconclusive, legends and inferences. But we have talked to someone who's actually done this, and he was able to tell us firsthand what happens."

My God, I thought. It could only be Jasper, in the many decades before he met Alice. I wondered if it bothered her. I knew that Edward could have slept with every girl at Forks High, and Lauren Mallory twice, and it wouldn't matter to me, but what Jasper did was far more disturbing…. I also knew Edward wouldn't tell me if Jasper was the source of his information. I shuddered, but then I thought, it could be much worse.

"Um, is there some sort of vampire listserv so you can ask these things?" I asked. "You know, "Re: Sex With Humans'?"

He laughed. "Of course. We're on Facebook, too. 'Aro's mood: acquisitive. Marcus's mood: inscrutable.'"

"Jasper's mood: whatever you're having."

"Jasper's mood around Edward for the last several months: frustrated beyond belief."

"Hey, that's your own fault," I protested. Mostly, I amended internally. He did offer.

But we'd gotten away from the subject. "So, what does happen?" I asked. He looked at me as if he was worried that he was going to have to explain to me how we'd spent most of our time since the wedding. "Okay, I know what happens, but your ... source was able to control himself long enough to uh, complete the act?"

"Yes. But you have to remember that his primary desire was not that sort of fulfillment, but thirst. This just happened to be a way to get what he wanted."

I considered that for a moment, then I remembered my original motive in starting this conversation. "So, if your semen gets on another part of my body, even if I've, say, bitten my tongue or cut the inside of my cheek or something, I'd be all right?"

"Yes," he answered, then waited for me to continue.

"So if, uh..." I hesitated, mentally cursing myself and my blushing. I was unable to get the words out.

He finally took pity on me. "Yes, I imagine that I'd like that very much," he said softly. Yes, he would. I could feel him hard against my thigh. "But…"

I was able to make him break off as I flicked my tongue against his neck.

"But I'd have to keep my hands off you, at least for now," he abruptly said. "And you must stop if I ask."

I looked up at him and nodded. "No time like the present," I muttered. "Maybe it won't be hard now," I added, before pushing him onto his back and lowering my lips to his neck.

I felt awkward at first: here I was, a married woman, who, truth be told, had had a lot of sex by human standards in the last few weeks, and still I knew less about doing this than the technical virgins in the sophomore class at any high school in the U.S. It seemed such an intimate act, in some ways more so than intercourse. And I was still so shy. I knew so little about everything compared with him.

But instinct and desire took me over as I made my way down his body. He was so beautiful, his muscles perfect for me, not bulky but lean and long, and even more than that, his skin seemed so sensitive to even my lightest touch. He shuddered under me as I traced the lines of his torso, as I licked his nipples, as I brushed my tongue against his navel and followed the soft line of hair there farther down.

I was so enthralled tasting his smooth skin, drunk with breathing in his scent, that I almost forgot my objective, and was a little surprised when the tip of his erection bumped my chin.

I kissed the taut skin there experimentally, and Edward inhaled sharply. I looked up to see his hands flash above his head, his fingers interlacing, far from me. I lowered my head again, drawing my tongue tentatively up and down his length. The taste was unexpectedly tart, almost making me grimace - it didn't taste like him, or rather, it tasted like him and … it must be me. I'd have to do something about that.

So I licked him thoroughly, my tongue wrapping around his length, flicking his tip, rubbing under his ridge, his taste becoming cleaner and his noises louder. I hazily realized that he was begging me: "Fuck, Bella, it feels so good, it feels too good, put your mouth on me, please, put me in your mouth…" I was teasing him without knowing it.

Before I could think about it too much, I grasped his length, and guided his tip into my mouth, wondering if I would hurt him before remembering that I couldn't. Even if I did this completely wrong, even if I bit him, I couldn't damage him. That encouraged me to take him in more, my cheeks suctioning around him, my hand holding his base. His guttural response made me wish I had straddled his leg so I could rub against him.

He came almost instantly, his body frozen but his mouth hurling profanities into the air. "Fuck, baby, _fuckfuckfuck_ ..." He was channeling his craving to thrust into my mouth into speech. I swallowed his release automatically, immediately regretting it; I was so fascinated by his reactions that I hadn't even tasted it.

He was smarter than me, kinder, stronger, faster - just all around more "er" than me - that this sign of the power I had over him was thrilling.

He took some moments to compose himself, then helped me crawl up, keeping me from getting too close to the heater, so we were face to face. He kissed me hard, then whispered, "I'm sorry that my cock gets to taste your mouth and I can't. But -" he kissed me again – "it enjoyed tasting your mouth very much … Were you okay with everything?"

"My mouth liked it too. It was … gratifying to see you."

He laughed, understanding. "Anytime you need an ego boost, just let me know."

He kissed my neck this time, just where I liked it most, and I realized the flaw in my plan. I was now alert and eager, but surely he…. I wondered if I looked as aroused as I felt.

"That worked, don't you think?" I asked, pulling back from his lips. He looked surprised.

"Worked seems a pedestrian word," he answered. "It was perfect. But you were wrong about one thing," He smirked at me.

"What's that?"

"I'm a 17-year-old vampire," he said, his lips moving to my ear. "It's never going to be _not hard_." His kiss cut off my giggle.

* * *

_A/N: This is probably the first fiction I've written since junior high school, and, well, I'm impressed by all the authors who write so well and so much. I'm envious._

_And yeah, some reviews would be nice._


	2. Chapter 2: SEA

_Disclaimer: Render unto Stephenie Meyer what is Stephenie Meyer's. Which is all this._

_Thanks to Favludo for a Kiwi correction._

* * *

Chapter 2: SEA

I broke off my reminiscing about the night before as I left the soup to simmer. I needed to go outside and cool my cheeks; I felt a little embarrassed that I'd been reliving my first experience of fellatio with my father seated a few feet away from me. And since I was at Charlie's, I should take this opportunity to call Renee, because any talk with her would be beyond mortifying within earshot of the Cullens. It'd be mortifying with Charlie around, too, but at least he couldn't hear Renee's end of the conversation. I made my excuses to my dad and took my cell phone out into the backyard.

"Bella!" Renee shrieked when she answered on the first ring, as if she'd been staring at her phone waiting for my name to pop up. "Tell me every detail, sweetie. I've been dying to hear from you - the Cullens told me that they couldn't reach you on the island."

"Hello to you, too, Torquemada."

Renee snickered at me. "I will forgive you for comparing me to the Spanish Inquisition if you tell me everything. _Everything._"

I tried to make my sigh inaudible. "What a day for an auto-da-fé. Well, since you knew where I was going before I did, tell me what Alice told you, so I don't bore you by repeating the same information." I didn't want to raise Renee's suspicions by contradicting Alice.

"She said you were going to some sort of … resort near Rio. She even showed us a picture of the house you were staying in - the place must have been really private, or cleverly laid out, because we couldn't see any houses near you …" she trailed off, and I realized that Alice hadn't really told her anything, or at least any detail Renee could grasp amid the torrent of Alice-chatter.

"Yeah, that's right. We barely saw anyone else there," I said truthfully. "And we did all our own cooking so we didn't have to go anywhere besides the beach. Mom, the snorkeling was great and the water was so calm, and warm…" Warm, I thought wistfully.

"So…" Renee started, and I knew the part I dreaded was coming. "Have you had any side effects from the pill?"

"Nope," I said, again honestly, though lying by omission. If I didn't take the pill, I couldn't get side effects from it.

I had gone to a gynecologist in Port Angeles recommended by Carlisle so that I could get a prescription and wave at Renee, as I did, a little beige case with missing pills. The exam was as pleasant as those things could be, I supposed, though Dr. Rich, who looked to be about Carlisle's putative age, couldn't hide her surprise when I told her I was a virgin and about to marry. I liked her anyway, especially after I read her first name on the nameplate on her desk as we chatted before the exam. Adrienne.

"Are you a fan?" I asked, pointing at the nameplate.

"I don't like poetry and I despise her," she said firmly. "Don't do something like that to your own children."

It was an easy promise to make, in more ways than one. "Oh, I know all about ridiculous names," I said.

The bestower of my ridiculous name was talking again. "That's great," Renee said. "Just remember to keep taking them every day. Life is so much better when you can choose when to have a child."

"Absolutely," I agreed. I recognized the subtext here, but it didn't bother me. Renee hadn't felt ready to be a mother; maybe she would even paradoxically be less child-like if she hadn't had a child when she was so young. I knew she loved me anyway. Maybe my being gone would make her grow up.

"You know, a couple of people at the wedding asked me if you were pregnant," Renee said contemplatively.

"What?" I was outraged. It's true that I had almost wished I could have had the prescription filled in Forks – I was sure that there were pregnancy rumors – but Charlie's health insurance didn't work at the pharmacy in town. Still, I hadn't thought anyone would ask my _mother_ about them.

"You know, people always think that…"

"But at my _wedding_!" I fumed.

"Sweetie, I know. But soon everyone will forget all about it," Renee said soothingly before going in for the kill. "And how has everything else been going?"

"Mommmm…" I warned, knowing the implication behind her question. I would have loved to be able to throw her a bone, but my big question was sort of … mathematical. _If my temperature is 98.6 degrees and my husband's is, say, 62, how many minutes in a hot shower does it take to warm him up enough so he can touch me?_

"Sweetie, I want you to be happy. And I want you to feel able to ask me questions, especially since, well, you're so young, and from what I remember of Forks, it was a black hole for sex education, and Esme's adorable, but she's still Edward's _mother_…"

I almost snorted at how far divorced her assumption was from reality. As I was learning to my discomfort, my sex life was quite a topic of discussion in at least one house in Forks. Considering what Renee had said about the wedding, it might be a topic in several of my former classmates' houses too. Ugh.

Well, I couldn't confide in Renee, but I could reassure her. "Mom, everything has been fantastic," I said, my voice saturated with sincerity. "It's been perfect. I mean, more than I could have imagined. I really don't have any questions for you –" that much was true, not questions she could answer – "but if I do, I will ask you, I promise."

"I'm glad, honey," she said, though I knew she was disappointed. "You know, for Phil and me –"

"Mom! I don't want reciprocity about your sex life!"

"Right," she said and laughed; I'd managed to mislead her into thinking I'd been open with her. "I'm an over-sharer, I know."

The conversation turned to other topics: the old friends she'd visited after the wedding, her and Phil's itinerary for the next few weeks, my plans to visit her in Florida in the fall, dismal weather permitting. Renee was perceptive enough that we didn't want to risk another stay in which Edward would have to cloister himself indoors all weekend. Alice had the task of figuring out when a tropical depression would allow a safe visit.

I wanted to see her so she'd be assured that I was happy, that I'd been happy before my demise. We ended our call with mutual "love you's" and I sighed and turned to go back to the kitchen.

Time to stew. And remember.

* * *

In the pale light of morning, the cottage was as charming as I had imagined it would be as I looked at it from our makeshift bed. Nothing pretentious, nothing much matching, but cozy and comfortable. Lots of bookshelves waiting to be filled. A few paintings, including -

"Christ, that's a Manet," I said in surprise and scrambled up to take a look, flinching a bit when my feet touched the cold floor. I didn't recognize the still life hanging above a console, but I was able to decipher the distinctive signature on the bottom left corner.

Edward shrugged. "Carlisle got it when Manet was very unfashionable, so it was quite inexpensive. An art historian would kill to see it."

"Why haven't _I_ seen it before? Why isn't it over your mantel in a place of honor?"

"Fireplaces are bad for paintings," he said casually. "Besides, we like to rotate them every few years."

"Does that mean you have the history of Western art stashed away in your basement?"

"No, it's in a climate-controlled warehouse in New York. We have to save the basement for the forging equipment and burglary tools."

Maybe he was joking, since he seemed ready to burst into laughter. But maybe not. I decided not to pursue this for now. "This house was an incredible gift, but why give it to us now, just as we're about to leave?" I asked.

"Because they knew you would want the privacy. And it's worth it to make you comfortable, even for just a few days. Besides, we'll be back…" he beckoned to me. "Come back to the bed – um, the mattress. I can't believe we're married and still fooling around on a twin. Anyway, we don't have to get up and take you to Charlie's quite yet."

I slipped back under the comforter and curled up on my side, my knees at his stomach. He was a little chilly.

"How far away are we from the house?" I asked.

"Far enough so that I can't hear anybody there—" I knew he meant their minds - "and nobody there can hear us."

"How many miles is that?"

"Five."

I stared at him. "And you own all the land in between?"

He looked at me reprovingly. "_We_ do. We own land down to the reservation line. Or rather it's held by the Pacific Northwest Trust, so people here don't get uneasy about us having so much - more uneasy than they already are. This is a good place for us, and we're trying to keep it as undeveloped as possible, so we buy land from logging companies, and we do trades with the Parks Service. We have a lot of land south of here, in Humptulips –"

Like millions of geography students before me, I giggled. Edward shook his head at me.

"Sorry. I'm a little giddy from learning about my real estate holdings," I snickered, and he laughed.

"A proud Indian name, and you giggle," he said in mock rebuke before turning a little dreamy. "You know, I love your giggle. I love that you have a chance to giggle…. So, we lived in Humptulips –" he waited out a repeat of my giggle "- when we went to school in Hoquiam. And we have a lot of acreage near the cousins in Alaska. Places good for hunting. Some in British Columbia. Some in upstate New York. Scotland. Norway. New Hampshire, now. New Zealand, near Wanaka - "

I snorted again. "Wanaka, of course. A proud -"

"A proud Maori name, yes. On South Island. Lots of deer and no predators. Besides us."

I knew he didn't mean an acre here, an acre there, but vast expanses of land to run and disappear in. I knew that we would live in all those places sometime.

"I love your laugh," I said abruptly, my giggles gone. "So few people hear it, but it's so beautiful."

* * *

Charlie's voice snapped me back to the present before I could start thinking about what I'd done to my husband in the shower after our real estate conversation. "Are you sure you don't need any money?" he asked. "For books? For living expenses?"

I sighed silently and pushed minced onion around in the iron skillet; it stuck a bit, since Charlie had left the pan soaking in the sink while I was in Brazil. I hated adding to the mountain of lies and omissions I was already guilty of with my father, but there was no choice.

"As I've said, I'm pretty well covered. Dartmouth is being quite generous with us," I answered. He didn't need to know that Dartmouth was being generous just by letting me in.

There had been quite a lot of subterfuge involving my tuition, which Charlie felt was his responsibility since it was due before the wedding: The financial aid forms that Charlie had unknowingly sent to a Hanover address that happened to be the same as that of the new Hale-Cullen house. The letter that Jasper had forged from the Dartmouth financial aid office that outlined the various grants and loans I had been awarded. The announcement that I was a recipient of a merit scholarship, given annually to a deserving young woman from the Northwest attending school in New England, from the obscure yet venerable Brandon-Whitlock Foundation ("established in 1950 by a couple who made their fortune developing a way to quickly and easily determine blood types," said the elaborately designed website hastily set up after Alice envisioned Charlie searching the Internet to investigate this group to make sure it wasn't a front for a white-slavery operation; the Cullens had put in so many inside jokes - the foundation's other charitable interests were preservation of wildlife habitats and improvements in the foster care system - that I feared that my dad would figure it out as a hoax; meanwhile, Rosalie had made up the list of previous recipients, each tiny bio accompanied by a photo that was surely drawn from mug shots of DUI offenders). The scholarship was large enough that it obviated the need for those Dartmouth loans. Next year, Charlie knew, I could pay with Edward's money, and that rankled as much as it relieved him.

"If I need anything, I promise I'll let you know," I said. Charlie hadn't gone to college himself, and I tried to ease his suspicions that something was fishy, that elite colleges just didn't hand out money to ordinary girls from hick towns. "You know, Dartmouth's not all that special. I've read that at Harvard and Princeton, there are no loans at all. Everybody just gets grants. Those Ivy League colleges are swimming in money."

That got me another "hmphf" that was Charlie's way of signaling he believed me without going out on a limb and saying so.

As I put a foil-wrapped rectangle of lasagna into the freezer, I heard a car stop in front of the house. Charlie shook his head as I sprinted to the door. Edward was there already, and I pulled him to me, hungry after our separation. He came willingly, but we didn't kiss. That would take too long, with Charlie waiting for us.

He stepped back and lifted my hands to his face, his lips seeking out the tiny burns that he knew I would have from a day of cooking: on the knuckle of my left middle finger from a hot roasting pan, my right index finger from boiling water I'd spilled. His cool lips soothed my new marks.

"Hey, Edward," Charlie called out from the kitchen. I could hear the reserve in his voice; maybe he would never get over my decision about Jake, whose whereabouts, as far as Charlie knew, were still unknown.

"Hello, Charlie," Edward responded as cheerfully as if he hadn't noticed, though he looked at me with a bit of smirk I'd have to ask him to explain later.

"I'm sorry that you have to leave so soon," Charlie said with an edge of a whine to his voice as we entered the kitchen. "You just got back."

"I know," Edward said, unruffled, "but we want to have time to settle into our house before orientation starts."

I winced at the thought of orientation. The incoming freshmen had to go on an overnight hiking slash bonding trip, and I couldn't even complain about it, since my father thought I was an outdoorswoman extraordinaire after all my "camping" trips with the Cullens. Trips mostly spent in Edward's bedroom while the rest of his family was out hunting. I had no idea how to set up a tent, and while I could hike a bit better now than before I moved to Forks, that wasn't saying a lot.

"Well, I hope you won't let Bella drive too much," Charlie continued.

"Don't worry," I assured him. "He won't." That was certainly true - he wouldn't let me drive at all, especially since I wouldn't go over 100 m.p.h.

"By the way," my father asked me, "where's your car?"

"It's being shipped." Thank goodness I didn't have to drive that damn conspicuous Mercedes across the country. "It gets terrible gas mileage," I said pointedly, adding silently, _because it has two frigging tons of armor on it._ Edward shrugged, unabashed. He was perfectly willing to pay for a sheik's new yacht to keep me in a missile-proof cocoon.

"How are you going to go?" Charlie asked, and I groaned ostentatiously. This could take a while, and it did. He and Edward discussed the merits of various routes, and then moved on to talking about sports. It was beyond me how Edward had found the time to learn anything about how the Mariners were doing - Emmett genuinely enjoyed sports, and Carlisle watched them to have something to talk to patients and colleagues about, but Edward had never demonstrated any interest in them. I supposed it was part of his effort to win Charlie over in the little time we had left.

I stopped the conversation when they started talking about Dartmouth sports, Charlie jokingly asking about the field hockey team's chances this year. But as I said goodbye to Charlie on the porch, I prolonged our hug - this could be the last time I saw him. We both parted with tears in our eyes.

I settled into the passenger seat of the impeccably clean Volvo, feeling grubby after my day in the kitchen.

"Do I smell like food?" I asked as we drove home.

"Food, always," he said, ruefully. "But perhaps I should see if you smell like cooking." He stopped the car in the drive to the big house, and leaned over so we could finally kiss as long as we wanted. Mmmm. When we broke apart, he said, "Cooking, not exceptionally so." He put the car back in gear. "Do you really like cooking?" he asked.

"You mean will I miss it?" I replied. I stopped to think. "I don't think so. I mean, I don't think I was destined to become Julia Child or anything. It was something I was competent at - which is a rare thing around you guys. And it was a way for me to take care of the people I love. But now most of the people I love can't use my cooking. So, no," I shrugged. "What was Charlie thinking?"

"In effect, that you looked tired, and that it was my fault," he said. "Maybe he's right," Edward went on. "Maybe you should just sleep tonight."

I narrowed my eyes at him as the car went into the garage. "Not a chance, Mr. Cullen."

I'd already had dinner with Charlie, so we stopped by the house just to say goodnight, and then Edward ran me back to our cottage. Both the fireplace and the coils of the space heater glowed red, inviting us to linger near them, but the mattress was back on the daybed, and Edward led me there. I folded my legs under me, facing him. He started playing idly with my hand.

"Since last night, I've been thinking," he started, "how unfair it is that you get to lick me, but I don't get to lick you." God, just hearing him say "lick" was making my stomach curl. "So Carlisle, Rose and I did a little research today while you were out."

Great, now I was feeling both aroused and mortified. "What form did this research take?" I asked. "Squirrels?"

"Um, we had a conference call with Kate and Tanya."

I pulled my hand away from his so I could cover my face. Edward was silent as I composed myself.

"And?"

"They agreed that if one looks carefully where one is putting one's tongue, it's safe. Except for the mouth, of course, since even we can't give that a thorough enough examination. But everywhere else is fine."

"_Everywhere _else?" Something was wrong here. "How can Kate and Tanya know that?"

Edward arched an eyebrow at me, waiting for me to get it. _Oh._ I was so innocent. Or maybe just slow.

"Beautiful vampire women who swing both ways," I mused. "It sounds like a porno."

"Trust me, it's not a very good one," Edward said. He didn't sound as if he was joking.

"Seriously?"

"With that as the conceit, we had to see it. The characterizations of the vampires left a lot to be desired."

"I didn't realize character development was an important element in porn."

"True."

There was silence a moment.

"So, would you like to … take a shower?" he asked, uncharacteristically hesitant. I realized it wasn't because he was suggesting something sexual, but something he continued to fear was dangerous.

"Why are you still worried?" I asked. "And do we need to be in the shower for this?"

"I know that Kate and Tanya haven't had any trouble –"

"In a thousand years –"

"But you could … have an allergic reaction. Something could go wrong."

"Edward, I had a really nasty vampire's venom in my bloodstream, and I was fine."

"After I got it out."

I nodded, acknowledging that. "I was fine," I said again, more insistently.

"I want the shower so the venom's not on your skin long."

"Done." I jumped off his lap, stumbling only a little, and reached my hand out to him. "Let's go. I need a thorough cleaning after all my cooking today."

The cottage's bathroom itself was stark, just black stone and simple chrome fixtures, but the shower was as extravagant as the ones at the main house. Vampires, Edward had told me, liked tubs and showers. A lot. For the most dedicated nomads, showers were the one lure of human civilization. Well, that and the easy food source. Edward set the temperature controls – scalding for his side, warm for mine - and started running the water.

As we stood next to the shower, Edward lifted his hands to take my clothes off as he would have on the island, but immediately dropped them in resignation. They were still too cold from the cool air outside. "You'll have to undress for me," he said softly.

"Only if you undress too," I answered, shy, hoping to avoid feeling as if I was doing a striptease. I wasn't ready to be on display like this. He nodded, and started undressing slowly. But I found that seeing him pull off his shirt and undo his jeans thoroughly distracted me from undressing myself; finally, he was naked and erect before me and I hadn't managed to even begin unbuttoning my blouse. I looked at him in apology, and he kissed me before stepping into the shower, leaving me to undress on my own. I removed my clothes, fingers clumsy, and followed him in, the steam billowing from the shower as I opened the door.

I enjoyed the enveloping spray and the view of Edward's back opposite me for quite a while, and then washed with the unscented soap that someone had put in here. Edward stepped to me and ran a finger across my collarbone. The temperature was bearable. Ah, better than bearable. He leaned down, and experimentally ran his tongue along the path his finger had taken. I shivered this time, and he stepped back slightly, concern on his face.

"No, no, it felt amazing," I reassured him, smiling broadly. "Do it again."

We spent the next hour this way, minute pauses for inspection followed by washed-away licks along my shoulders, my arms, my spine from skull to cleft, the curve of my bottom, my belly button, my hips, the backs of my knees and finally over and around my breasts, his tongue teasing my nipples until they were almost painful. I blessed providence for the latest advances in hot-water heaters.

By now I was a panting mess, my skin the texture of a prune, long past any embarrassment at the prospect of his head between my legs. He dropped to his knees. "You don't know how long I've wanted to do this," he murmured into the hair there. "Imagining the taste of you…" He ran his heated thumbs down my lips, then his nose up my folds, and I keened. He gazed at my sex a long moment, his expression unreadable, controlled. Then his face cleared, and he glanced up at me, his eyes dark with need. He bent his head down and swiped his tongue delicately against me.

I screamed.

Fortunately, I was already pressed against the stone walls, so I couldn't injure myself by smashing into them. Edward pulled back immediately and looked up at me in alarm. I stared back, breathless.

"Bella, talk to me," he urged.

"I'm …" I breathed out, "fine. Fine. I didn't know it would be so intense, that's all. Really," I swore, coaxing him back into position.

I lasted two licks this time before I pushed on his shoulders to stop. Dammit. His tongue made me want to squirm, to giggle, to lose my mind, to escape. We tried again and again, my back ending up wedged in a corner, Edward's arms holding me up as I was both overwhelmed and unable to let go. Finally, I begged him to stop; my legs were trembling, our bodies were engorged with unreleased desire.

"I can't take any more," I panted. "I need you inside me."

Edward shoved aside the shower door, making it bang hard against itself, then grabbed towels and sped me to the living room, pulling the mattress off the daybed and flinging it before the fireplace.

He tumbled us to the floor, our legs and arms wet and tangling, the towels twisted under us, steam rising from our superheated skin. I reached down to stroke his cock and he flinched, almost in pain. "I want to be inside you so much," he rasped out. "I'm going to come so hard in you, I can't… God," he said, a finger running along my sex, "you are so swollen. You are going to feel so good around me, so warm, so ready…"

Despite his words, he didn't move; I could see that he was trying to slow himself. I pushed on his shoulders impatiently. "Down," I ordered. He rolled to his back and as I straddled his hips, I couldn't help pressing down against his length hard even though I knew he could hurt me by lifting his hips just a little too much. In this position in which I had so much apparent control, I was still incredibly vulnerable. I saw his jaw working, clenching, his breath hissing. I moved up and caught his tip at my entrance, then slid down and up with shuddering breaths till he filled me, and I could lean my chest against his. His arms were splayed out next to his head, away from me, and he let me pull down on his biceps till I could place my hands on his wrists, making flimsy restraints.

"Don't move," I said, my voice low and hoarse. "Let me do it." I moved as he writhed under me, his body tense with restraint, my hands and words reminding him not to buck. My clit rubbed against his hard flesh, the angle of our joining delicious, and I was soon convulsing above him, whimpering in my release before I heard the moans and imprecations that told me he was near. I clutched his wrists and slammed down onto his hips, then again as he came. I finally released my hands and collapsed on his chest for a few glorious minutes.

Eventually, though, the hard surface I was on became too uncomfortable. I resentfully lifted myself off him, feeling the trickle of wet down my thighs. I used one towel for cleanup, the other to cover myself as I cooled down. Edward gently pulled me up and turned us both to our sides, his chest to my back, his hand resting on my stomach, his cock snugly behind me but not begging for attention. Yet.

"Sorry that I couldn't hold on back there," I murmured lazily after a while. "Were you disappointed?"

"Never say that, love," he answered. "Besides, my informants predicted something like this."

_Crap._ The reminder of that conversation roused me from my post-coital torpor. But I refrained from saying anything more than an encouraging "Hmmm?"

"Our tongues are sometimes too much for humans at first, though they didn't tell me you'd try to dig a hole in the tile with your back. I hope you won't be sore." I shrugged, and he went on. "But with a bit of practice, we'll be perfect, as you like to remind me."

"Practice sounds good," I said, and I felt him twitch behind me. "In fact, so I don't forget everything I learned from last night, I think I need to practice on you. Are you up for that?"

He snickered at my question, but yes, he was.

* * *

A_/N: Thanks for reading and reviewing. And do it some more! _


	3. Chapter 3: SPK

_Disclaimer: It's all Stephenie Meyer's. _

* * *

Chapter 3: SPK

I woke with a groan the next morning, the skin on the swell of my breasts and various other parts of my body feeling stiff. It took me a few seconds to realize why - l'd managed to persuade Edward to try his tongue on me without water, arguing we should do it with Carlisle nearby, and once he saw it was safe, he took to it enthusiastically. We'd even tried it everywhere else, but the sensation remained too overwhelming for me to enjoy it, endure it, for long.

"Bella, I'm sorry, but you have to get up if you want to say goodbye to everyone," Edward said next to me, his clothed body atop the covers. "You can sleep in the car if you want." The fire was out and the heater off, and the air felt cool on my face. I snuggled more deeply into the comforter in denial.

"I don't think that you should have to listen to me snore while you're driving," I said. I yawned and stretched a bit, the odd feeling of my skin reminding me. "Edward, is your venom ... sweet?" I asked.

He looked puzzled. "Why?"

"Because I feel as if I've been brushed with sugar water, and it's dried on me."

"I don't know. Mine doesn't taste sweet to me, and I've never tasted anyone else's."

"You tasted James's."

"I was tasting _you_. _His_ venom," his voice was contemptuous, "could have been the vampire equivalent of Château d'Yquem and it would have been unnoticeable compared to you. On its own, though, I am certain it tasted like pure hate."

"Oh." I contemplated his words for a second. "Anyway, I wondered if that's why you smell the way you do to me."

"I smell sweet to you? How misleading." He shook his head. "I've showered, and you should too. Because the family won't smell sugar, they'll smell -"

"Sex, I know," I finished. I stretched again and reluctantly sat up. Edward kissed my now exposed shoulder and inhaled deliberately.

"You smell wonderful," he said. He sighed and went on, "You'll need to be quick. Alice has a very precise timetable."

I knew that, too. Alice had calculated to the second when the race should begin for maximum cloud cover and night skies in populated areas. There were a bunch of other rules as well: Alice had to inform the others of speed traps, road closings and traffic jams, for instance; and Emmett had a speed handicap because his Jeep was slower than the other vehicles. The finish line was the hotel in New York. Sabotage was forbidden.

"Sabotage?" I had asked when Edward had described the race to me.

"Yes, sabotage. And there will be attempts at sabotage, despite the rules and despite Alice's almost certainly knowing about it. We are inveterate cheats, as Esme told you."

"Would you cheat?"

"Of course." He looked almost offended that I'd asked. I made a moue at him and he laughed. "You're stuck with me now," he said. "This marriage was final sale."

* * *

Alice had calculated our best start time as well, later in the day. The precision was a reminder of how circumscribed the Cullens' lives could be when they weren't somewhere as gloomy as Forks. No wonder they wanted to come back here even with the wolves so close by.

The cars and Jasper's motorcycle were lined up outside the house when we arrived; the siblings were still tossing luggage into their trunks. Esme and Carlisle watched from the porch. They had thrown off their human disguises as doctor and architect, father and mother to five teenagers. Instead they looked young and extraordinarily beautiful in T-shirts and jeans, their feet bare and arms wrapped around each other's waists; they'd be just as convincing Dartmouth students as the rest of us – perhaps more so in my case. Nonetheless, they kept offering last-minute bits of parental advice, the one that made me giggle being: "No speeding till you get well clear of Forks. You don't want to force Charlie to ticket you." Yeah, that would be awkward - for Charlie.

Rosalie had an old-fashioned leather driving cap on, to keep her long hair out of her face in the open convertible. Jasper was long and lean in black leather, with gloves on his hands and a black scarf around his neck. With his redundant helmet on, he'd be completely covered from the sun.

I whistled at him. "Jasper, you look extremely badass in that outfit."

He raised his eyebrow at me. "I'm not sure that's a compliment," he said dryly. But Alice, still arranging the astonishing amount of luggage she wanted to stuff into her Porsche, sang out, "He does! He does! I told him he'd be incredible in all the leather."

They drew lots to determine starting order, even though Alice sighed and said she knew already, and Rosalie won. There was a flurry of hugs and goodbyes, Emmett humming something that sounded like carousel music in my ear as he hugged me with exaggerated care, Alice tapping an invisible watch on her wrist, and they were off, gravel hitting the trees lining the drive. As I turned away to go inside and make breakfast, I noticed Esme's and Carlisle's faces.

"This isn't your first time to be empty nesters, is it?" I asked.

"No, but it's always hard to see them go, even when they've been particularly irritating," Esme answered.

Edward coughed an "Emmett!" into his fist.

"Oh, no, I was thinking of you, dear," Esme said sweetly. Carlisle and I burst out laughing at Edward's expression.

I wondered if Esme would be lonely, Carlisle busy at the hospital, the children away, but she shook her head when I asked. "It's nice to get the house completely to ourselves sometimes," she answered, "especially since Carlisle's taking some time off now." Carlisle said something in her ear and gave her a look that made me guess that Esme would be plenty busy while we were away.

* * *

Despite my resolution to be an entertaining passenger, I fell asleep around Sequim, lulled by the smooth purr of the Volvo. I awoke an hour later when the metronomic operation of the car slowed. We were pulling into the parking lot of a mall in a south Seattle suburb.

"Are you taking me to lunch at Applebee's?" I asked in confusion as the car came to a stop, a familiar logo visible through the windshield. Edward handed me a bottle of water so I could take a swig and freshen my mouth.

"Should I? We used to own it, but –"

"You mean, _own_ it, own it?" I choked a little on the water.

"Yes. I mean, chunks of it, but none of them substantial enough on their own to get the S.E.C. after us," he said. I stared at him until I saw his mouth twitch.

"Hey, you could have," I said, trying to excuse my gullibility.

"Financing Applebee's sprawl isn't a good long-term strategy for us - we own so much land to prevent precisely that. Nor can I judge its products. Is it good?"

"Um, I don't need to experience frozen potato skins again in my existence."

"You don't have to." He pointed at the big-box store to our left. "I was thinking of going there."

I looked at him and smiled. "You're brilliant."

"Only by human standards. Trust me, I'm rather ordinary."

I'd never been shopping like this with Edward, and he looked baffled under the fluorescent glare as we stepped into the cavernous store, rows and shelves of _stuff_ spread out before us.

"Have you ever needed to be in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond?" I asked, noting his close-to-dazed expression.

"Well, we've had to replace a lot of beds over the years, as you know - " he glanced at me slyly "- but we have a carpenter for that. And Esme has our sheets made in Belgium." He looked around again. "Does this place actually sell beds?"

"Not really. It doesn't sell bathtubs either."

"Does it have what we want?"

"I certainly hope so."

He gave the store another frustrated sweep. "How do you figure out where to go?"

"We just ask a sales clerk for directions."

Edward turned to me with a look that I recognized from having seen it on Charlie and Phil. The idea of asking for directions horrified him.

"You are such a guy," I told him.

His expression changed. "Truly?" he asked in bemusement. "Nobody has ever said that to me before."

I had to giggle a bit. "It's not a compliment."

In the end, I was the one who flagged down a chubby older woman in a smock to lead us where we needed to go. As she walked slowly in front of us, I could feel Edward's impatience, since he could pick out the route in her head. She finally stopped next to a display of electric blankets.

As I looked at the stacks of plastic-wrapped bedclothes, my hand in Edward's, I probably resembled a kid in a candy store. "Two?" I suggested in a murmur. "One for over and one for under? Oh –" I realized I'd never asked - "what size is our bed in Hanover?"

_Our bed_. I shared a bed with this man. A bed my father wouldn't walk in on us using, that my new siblings wouldn't hear us enjoying. I felt a sudden flush across my chest.

"King," he answered, looking at me knowingly. My heart must have been beating like a hammer.

Our guide watched us curiously, I assumed trying to calculate our ages and figure out why we'd be in the market for bedding. I scratched a non-existent itch on my cheek with my free hand, hoping she'd notice my rings. Though come to think of it, perhaps that would scandalize her more than our just being friends with benefits. Edward didn't seem bothered, so maybe she was just wondering how annoying we'd be.

A lot annoying. Now that directions were no longer involved, Edward wasn't reluctant to pepper the woman with questions. Which one was hottest? Which was safest? Which one heated up the fastest? When she said they all took 15 minutes, I couldn't repress my sigh of disappointment. Fifteen minutes to heat up, then extra time to heat up my husband. We didn't need to worry about birth control, but we still couldn't be spontaneous. The blankets would be good in the morning, though, after a night on. Umm, warm wake-up sex.

We ended up buying six blankets to try out. The testing could begin tonight.

* * *

As we drove across Washington State, we talked about where he had traveled, and where I hadn't, and it was pretty much the same list, apart from a small town in Italy and an island in the Atlantic. Everything east of Seattle on this trip was new to me. I stared out my window for miles at Mount Rainier, which dominated the view to the south. True to his word, Edward slowed down enough for me to take in my surroundings when warranted. He seemed to know the country like the back of his hand, turning off the highway for a view of a river bend, or a short hike to a cliff overlooking a valley in the Cascades that he remembered from a trip decades ago.

"You see some beautiful things when you hunt," he said, even though he was looking at me.

The mountains and forests changed to farmland when we crossed the Columbia River, and Edward started driving like a competitor at Le Mans. Still, it was dark when we arrived under clear skies in Spokane, exactly on Alice's schedule, pulling up in front of a turn-of- the-century robber baron/mining magnate's wet dream of a fancy hotel.

"Yeah, I always figured Spokane for a Spanish Mediterranean kind of town," I said as I stared at it.

"Wait till you see inside," he said as we surrendered the car to the valet. It was considerably warmer here than in Forks, and I pulled my hair off my neck as I inhaled the dry air.

The lobby was huge, and Edward suggested that I sit and uh, enjoy the architecture as he checked in. So I examined the gold bosses on the marble columns and the gold stamping on the ceiling beams and the gold railings of the gallery and the gold barley sugar lampposts for a few minutes until he returned to sit on the settee next to me, kissing me as if he'd been away for hours.

"What do you think of it?" I asked when we were done, waving around me. He had told me he'd never been here before, this not being a natural stopping point for Cullen trips, hunting or otherwise.

"You think it's over the top, but it makes me nostalgic," he answered. "There used to be a lot more of this. Theaters decorated like a Hollywood version of a pharaoh's palace, banks like Greek temples, bathhouses like a Pompeian villa, Victorian railway station hotels that were the grandest structures in town… So many imaginative buildings that have disappeared. "

If it made Edward feel this way, I could learn to like it.

He went on, "I'm glad this is here – these behemoths are the best hotels for us."

"Why?" I asked. This was the first time we would stay at a hotel together. I didn't know the rules.

"It's giant, so nobody would care if we suddenly had to stay inside all day because of the weather. It has valets, so we don't have to go into the sun to get our cars. It has windows that open. It's luxurious, and we just like that. And it's old, so the walls are thick."

"So you can't hear people?" I asked, puzzled. Even a thick wall wouldn't seem to be much of a barrier for him.

"No, so nobody can hear _us_," He laughed as my face lighted up. "Shall we go see our room?"

An irritatingly chatty bellman accompanied us with our suitcases and shopping bags upstairs, but Edward got rid of him quickly, closing the door behind him decisively as I stepped into the middle of our room, which had high ceilings, a respectable amount of acreage, a view of downtown Spokane, and a massive, intricately carved bed.

I turned around to see Edward standing stock still against the door, staring at me. And then he leapt.

The movement was familiar because he had done exactly the same thing the first time I'd been in his room in Forks, and yet new because we were such different people now, we had endured so much, we'd both had our hearts broken and mended. His jump carried us across the room and onto that giant bed. The mattress was firm and we bounced and I squealed, but the frame was solid and silent.

"Excellent," Edward said, smiling down at me before engaging in his new favorite activity, licking along my jaw and down my neck, stopping to suck wetly on my collarbone, his tongue cold but tolerable on my skin. I was immediately drowning, my three times to come up already gone, and I clutched at his back, because there was no feeling in the world like having Edward's lips anywhere near my neck. Soon we were groping each other furiously, grinding, knowing that we had to stop, Edward's hands running over my clothes and not daring to touch my skin. He finally pulled away and stared at me, looking tense and frustrated. I didn't want that look.

"Edward, was that dry humping?" I asked in faux innocence. His face relaxed and he laughed, because, yes, he had had to explain that term to me on the island, though dry humping there was able to proceed without loss of momentum into the wet variety.

"Oh, the things you kids don't know these days … God, I want to feel you, and I can't," he sighed, his hand stroking my hair, "and I haven't fed you dinner, and the only option around here is room service. Is that okay?"

"Sure," I answered, rather excited, in fact. I'd never had room service, except on my disastrous flight to Phoenix; I couldn't even remember what I had eaten. I found the menu and ordered, and watched Edward ripping open the packages of two electric blankets, making the bed and finding the nearest sockets. Since he did all that in under half a minute, there wasn't much I could actually see.

The food was fine, but I was distracted, and Edward teased me for staring at the bed. Even so, he took my dishes and shoved the cart out into the hallway as soon as I finished, and I teased him for his impatience. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and get ready for the night, dawdling a while. When I came out in the hotel's robe, the lights were low and Edward was in bed, the bedclothes pulled up to his chin, looking delighted.

"What?" I asked.

"You are going to love this," he practically purred, lifting the covers in invitation. I dropped the robe on the floor, exposing myself for an instant before hiding under the covers, and Edward inhaled. "And I'm going to love fucking you in this," he breathed out as I slid in next to him so we faced each other. _Oh, God, what a mouth he had on him. _

He was right. It was divine. I moaned and he shuddered as I pressed myself against his warm naked flesh. It was like coming out of a freezing swimming pool and lying on sun-baked stone. Stone that somehow made all your bliss synapses fire.

"What temperature is it in here?" I asked, running my foot up and down his warm leg and coming back up to hook my knee around his hip. He bucked into me with a groan. Mmmm, the wet variety.

"The controls are at maximum," he said absently, "but I'd rather talk about your temperature right now." He rolled us so he was on top of me, and this time I tilted my hips into his and sighed out in pleasure. He placed a fingertip on my mouth. "Med school has taught me that it's probably 98.2 inside there," he said, tapping, then replacing his finger with his lips, kissing me softly, caressing my abused lips with his own.

"Not 98.6?" I asked when we resurfaced.

"That's not the average. Here –" his lips pressed under my left ear "—it's 96.5, and here—" he moved to the hairline along my neck – "it's, hmm, 97."

He slid down my body and to the side, which meant his length was no longer pushing against me and I whimpered a bit. He ignored me, though, concentrating on the pinked skin of my chest before licking the tops of my breasts and making me whimper more. He couldn't seem to get enough, using his tongue and lips and fingers and breath on my curves and nipples until I almost felt as if I would come from this and it was too much to bear. I pushed on his shoulders and he stopped immediately, looking up at me in question.

"I need to catch my breath," I panted, and he nodded, but glided his hands under my breasts, considering.

"Ninety-eight point one," he announced after a few moments, and by then I had caught up enough to be able to giggle at his precision. He shook his head and blew a raspberry in my cleavage as a reprimand.

The skin of my stomach was cooler, 91, and his tongue declared my belly button to be 96.4. My giggles died down as he slid lower, and my thighs moved restlessly, damp skin sliding against damp skin. He breathed me in, and I knew what he wanted, and I doubted I was ready.

I forced myself to speak, to say what I needed. "Not yet," I said. "Just fingers."

He blew out on my clit, making my breath catch again, but next his lips were back at my neck, the sheets and blankets again covering us both, and his hand was over my sex and my hips had taken on a mind of their own. I grunted and groaned and his fingers made wet sounds against my flesh. Suddenly his cock was back at my entrance and his voice was urgent in my ear.

"Bella, are you all right with this?" I opened my eyes and stared into his. I understood the question, for he had asked it before. This was the position that had caused us so much trouble on the island, but I wanted it, so I nodded. He would rely on me to guide him. He thrust in immediately, smooth and slow, and I lost myself at the contact, so close already that I had to cry out as I arched under him. He stilled to maintain his control, only his hand moving between us, as I saw asterisks of light under my eyelids.

He started moving again even as my muscles continued pulsing around him, no surcease in the sensation. "Yes," I panted to his push.

"Yes," harder, now.

"Yes," harder.

"Yes," still harder.

"There," I said, as he reached the line where human pleasure became pain. He knew exactly how much force was right last time, but unlike him, I was a mutable creature, and the line moved, though he was learning that I wasn't quite as fragile as he expected. I wrapped my legs around his torso, and his hands gripped the pillow cradling my head.

"You feel wonderful moving in me," I told him, and he groaned at my words and at my teeth scraping his shoulder and my nails scratching his back without leaving a mark.

"You feel wonderful around me," he said, and I shivered in turn at his breath in my ear and his tongue leaving wet trails on my neck. We moved without words then, just sounds, until his body refused to hold back any more and took me along so that I cried out again.

I knew without looking that the pillow was shredded. I was so heated now that my stomach was wet against his, and he almost slid as he adjusted his weight above me.

"I was wrong about your temperature. You're not the average," he murmured, moving slightly in me. "_Here_, you are fire."

* * *

Considering that we had had a year and a half of foreplay, it is perhaps understandable that we were needy for each other all night, the electric blankets working so valiantly that my whole body became slick with sweat. I would doze off, still joined to him, but his movement or mine would rouse me, and we would start again. We stopped only when Edward gripped my hips to immobilize me as he hummed my lullaby, forcing me into a couple of hours of sleep until the sun rose behind a blanket of clouds.

It was to be a long day of driving, for we planned to spend the next few days with the clouds in Yellowstone; I fell asleep in the car almost immediately, and a few hours later Edward informed me with a grin that I'd missed all the considerable natural beauties of Idaho and we were now in Wyoming. Apparently the closest hotel that met vampire standards was a gigantic resort in Jackson Hole with a view of the Tetons rising abruptly from the valley floor.

From our balcony, we could see deer and elk stepping delicately in the grass underneath the ski lift until the breeze shifted and we were upwind. _There goes dinner_, I thought as they bounded away from the predator, and indeed, Edward left me temporarily sated and asleep at night to run in the elk reserve nearby. The evenings were cold, but the days were gray and pleasant, and we spent them in the park, the heat from the geysers almost an aphrodisiac to us, laughing as the boiling water shot up.

The temperature rose dramatically as we drove east, mountains descending to plains, and Edward sped up again. Since there was no point in looking out the window, I spent my time staring at him, adjusting the air-conditioning to my liking or playing with his music. He suggested a compilation of sad Portuguese songs, in partial apology for our having to skip Rio, he said. They all seemed to have the same lyrics, so I started singing along, badly.

"Sodade, sodade," I warbled in my terrible accent.

"You should definitely wait on your language studies until your brain has expanded," he said. I flicked his ear with my finger, then shook my hand in pain. He shook his head at my forgetfulness.

A lot of his music was by artists I had heard of but never heard - Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Dave Brubeck, the Stooges, Etta James, Joy Division, Chuck Berry, the Talking Heads. "Really?" he asked. "The Talking Heads aren't obscure or that old. Didn't your parents listen to them?"

"Charlie? Are you serious? You must have heard his music sometime when you were lurking outside the house." He shrugged, but had the grace to look a bit sheepish. "Springsteen, the Stones, Bob Seger, Neil Young, Zep and Tom Petty. That's it. Renee likes Enya and classical music to have brunch by. And unlike some people in this car, I really am a teenager - "

"A preternaturally mature teenager."

"Yeah, whatever -"

He rolled his eyes at my attempt at a teenager's intonation. "_That _was completely convincing."

"- but the point is that not so long ago I was supposed to be listening to Hilary Duff or somebody. Whether my parents listened to them or not, the Talking Heads are old, Grandpa."

He laughed. "You know, in a few centuries, nobody will think anything of our age difference," he said.

I winked back at him. "I'm looking forward to it," I said, trying to be calm, but I'm sure my pulse betrayed my excitement. I didn't want to draw too much attention to his making such an offhand comment about my change, so I started scrolling through the songs on his iPod or iTouch or whatever mammoth number of gigabytes it was.

Interesting. "Um, Edward, is there something you need to tell me?" I showed him the screen, secure in the knowledge that he could drive perfectly at 100-plus miles an hour and look at an electronic distraction at the same time. "That's an awful lot of Broadway show tunes."

He laughed again. "Ah, you have discovered the real secret I've been hiding, my little beard. The wedding, the declarations of love, the sex, the sex, the sex - just a front to hide my true passion for Mike Newton….," I snorted unkindly at "passion" and "Mike Newton" being in the same sentence. "Bella, I'm 100 years old. I lived through a time when all the hit songs came from Broadway shows. My parents, Rosalie and Emmett, and I can all sing whatever Kern or Gershwin or Porter song you name. Any requests?" I shook my head, unable to summon up anything.

"Alice and Jasper, too?" I asked.

"They may be able to as well, but the way they lived was a little too … feral for keeping up with music until they joined us, past Porter's prime. Here –" he worked the music player until he found the playlist he wanted " - I think you aren't ready for Ethel Merman, but you'll recognize something, I'm sure."

We listened to Ella Fitzgerald's rich, warm voice for a while, his baritone joining her alto occasionally for a stanza or two. _"I can't dance/don't ask me/I can't dance, monsieur, with you,"_ he sang, twisting the words and giving me a wicked grin.

Porter came next. _"Let me spend my life making love to you/ day and night, night and day,"_ he murmured, turning to look at me, his eyes dark.

"I've heard that in a Starbucks," I muttered distractedly.

As I stared at him, I felt as if heat had started visibly radiating from my body. I felt dizzy with it. I imagined running my tongue along his jaw that would never have a five o'clock shadow and down the strong tendon on the side of his neck again and again. I remembered doing this one exceptionally humid afternoon on Isle Esme, the taste of his skin mixing on my tongue with the salt of the sea, the salt of my sweat, sweet and salty together. We had just returned from swimming, and we were in the bedroom kissing and frantically grasping at each other's wet suits, tugging at their strings -

It was only when the car stopped on the shoulder that I realized that he had downshifted and pulled over. Suddenly, he had my seat pushed back and he was somehow hovering over me. I wasn't sure how the geometry of that could even work. "Bella," he murmured into my left ear, "what are you thinking of?"

"Of you and the island," I said. My eyes flickered to the back seat, realizing as I did it that it was impossible. We were on a stretch of flatness, with no forest to hide us. He saw the movement.

"Baby, I'm afraid we're a bit exposed here," he said. Even as we spoke, a pickup slowed as it passed us, its passenger trying to peer inside our windows. "Besides, we're adults – at least officially – and we have credit cards. There's a place up ahead that will suit our purposes if it still exists. Bella … can you think about something else for a few minutes?"

"You mean, like guys do, thinking about baseball?" I asked.

"Perfect," he said, and blurred back into the driver's seat.

I tried to calm my body down by thinking about the Mariners, but since I didn't really know that much about them, I wasn't as successful as I should have been. Edward let out a sigh of relief a few miles down the road when a grouping of little faded green bungalows appeared, pickups parked in front of most of them. It was one of those motels built in maybe the '50s that you can't imagine surviving in a world crowded with hotel chains. I could picture the little cabins' antiquated kitchenettes, plywood paneling and tiny showers with bad drainage. They were surely hot as hell inside. Perfect, indeed.

Edward stopped at the biggest of the bungalows, which had a wooden sign emblazoned "manager" pointing to it, and stepped out of the car. A few minutes later he returned, and drove us a few yards to a cabin, explaining as he did that our neighbors were all oil workers assigned to the night shift, and all asleep.

"I told the manager that my wife wasn't feeling well and we'd be here just a few hours until you … recovered," he said.

"He believed you?"

"Of course," Edward said dismissively. "He also apologized that the cabin would be hot, since the air-conditioning hasn't been on," he added. "Think you can deal with that?"

"Uh-huh."

After the air-conditioned car, the cabin did feel like a furnace, and Edward immediately stepped over the AC unit in the side window, turning on its fan for the noise and closing the curtains above. The beds were twins covered in scratchy-looking floral polyester bedspreads, and I sat down on one to unbuckle my sandals. Just that effort made me sweaty. I felt Edward watching me from across the room, the current flowing between us. I stood up and faced him. We needed to be standing up.

"Come here," I said softly.

In a stride he had me pressed against him, his cool hand under my hair and cradling my head. "Tell me," he murmured against the pulse in my neck, "tell me now what you were thinking about in the car." After a tiny pause, he ran his tongue from the hollow below my left ear to the hollow of my throat.

He wanted Shy Bella to talk, and he was playing dirty to make her.

"Uh, it was … that really hot day on the island," I lost my train of thought for a moment as he moved to the other side of my neck, his lips becoming warmer in response to my skin and the stifling room. "And ... I was starting to sweat -"

"Like now?" I felt his tongue lick away a bead of perspiration from my temple.

"Uh-huh... our hands were all over each other..." I mumbled. His hands now were hovering over my torso, not quite touching. He was moving slowly, waiting for his skin to warm up. My body was pulsating, following the movements of his hands as if I was connected to them by invisible strings.

"What was that like, exactly?" he asked, his lips back at my ear.

"You didn't have a shirt on." I tugged on the sleeves of the white Oxford he wore over his gray T-shirt, and pulled it off, tossing it onto the bed. He lifted his head and reached behind his neck to lift off the T-shirt. I put a hand on his chest, over his heart. "You're getting warmer," I whispered.

He put his hand over mine. "What else?"

"You didn't have pants on," I said, slipping my hand out from under his to run it over the muscles of his stomach. I unbuttoned the top button of his jeans and lowered the zipper, then pulled down on the waist. His jeans fell on their own, and he toed off his shoes and kicked away his pants. With his lips off my neck, I could think a bit more clearly, despite the distraction of his legs, which I needed to gaze at for a moment since I hadn't really seen them thoroughly since the island. I grasped the waistband of his boxers over his hips. "You didn't have these either," I noted.

Obviously, I needed to be more hands-on getting those off. I slowly pulled the dark blue material over his erection, lowering myself to my knees and in the process kissing the velvety skin of his tip. Edward hissed in a sharp breath, and I darted out my tongue to lick down his length before pulling back to rest on my heels.

"Oops, sorry," I said, looking up at him in mock apology. "I forgot, none of that on the island."

This time I got a groan. "Tease," he said, and helped pull me up to my feet. "What else?" he murmured against my lips.

"You were in your board shorts."

"Let's skip that part. What were _you_ wearing?"

"No shirt. No shorts." We could move a little faster now. His skin was rapidly getting comfortable for me.

They were quickly gone.

"Bra?" His fingers ran over the sodden white satin, thumbs carefully pressing my erect peaks through the material.

"No."

Gone.

"Panties?" Their satin was sodden as well, though not just from sweat.

"No, but there was a swimsuit."

"Let's skip that part again."

He lowered himself onto his knees, parting my legs, then carefully ripped along the side seams of the panties, letting them fall off. So considerate, my husband, not wanting me to trip stepping out of my underwear. He rubbed the tip of his nose in the curls between my legs, breathing me in, and after a heartbeat, touching the tip of his tongue to my clit once. I moaned.

He pulled back. "Sorry," he said. "I forgot, there was no tongue there, either."

"Cold bastard."

He fluidly rose from his heels and put his right hand on my bare shoulder. "Am I at least a tepid bastard yet?" he asked, the teasing gone from his voice.

"You'll do." He instantly put one arm around my waist, and covered a breast with his free hand. I arched into his palm.

"I think you need to jog my memory a bit more," he said after some minutes of communing with my chest. "We did, after all, make love once or twice on the island. Were there any other details you can tell me?"

"You took the mattress off the bed and put it up against the wall."

I wasn't sure where he'd find room in the crowded little cabin to do this, but then he was gone and I heard a scraping noise, and a twin mattress stripped of its bedspread was suddenly on the paneled wall where a chest of drawers used to be.

"And?"

For answer, I walked over and stood flush to the mattress, my palms pressing against the thin sheet that covered it, breathing heavily, perspiration trickling between my breasts. "You were over here too."

For the first time, he pressed the naked length of his body against mine, his erection against my stomach.

"You put your hand under my bottom and … lifted me up," I went on with difficulty. He complied, and I curled my legs around him, and now I could feel his erection teasingly close to my sex. With one little movement he could be inside me. "You slid me down a bit -"

"I don't think I did," he said, in a reprimanding tone. Crap, of course he was right. He was going to make me lose my sanity.

"Umm, yeah, you put your thumb on me first…"

"_Where_ did I put my thumb, Bella?"

"Oh, God, Edward, on my …. clit," I answered, almost angrily, "and you rubbed me there, and it felt so good …. Christ, just like that …. ohhh…." I became incoherent as his fingers moved on me.

"I could do this all day, Bella, but was there more?" he asked after a while, his voice strained.

"Uh… you slid me down a bit, _I promise_, and you—" he adjusted our positions then, and pushed inside me, keeping one hand flat under my bottom, fingertips splayed away from my skin, the other holding the mattress steady against the wall. We moved to the sound of our grunts and moans, chasing sensations, my head and shoulders eventually bracing against the mattress for better leverage, his hand moving under me to support my back. He watched my face intently. We knew our limits in this position better now, and his thrusts were harder than on the island, and it was –

"So good," I keened, before resorting to gibberish as I came around him. He made similar sounds in a lower register as he followed, taking his hand from my back and leaving me uncomfortably suspended.

"Edward, help?" I asked when we were both panting in recovery. "I can't stay like this." He quickly lifted my shoulders from the mattress and hugged me close, holding me up. I felt as sweaty as if I'd run a marathon. I wondered if I'd slip from his arms.

"Sorry, I needed to get my nails away from you." He opened his left hand to show me the indentations in his palm, a reminder of how damaging he could be to my defenseless skin. I smiled up at him, a reminder to him that I wasn't afraid.

"I need to shower. But I think I need to lie down first," I said woozily. Edward lowered me onto the bed that was still intact, yanking off the disgusting bedspread first. He found a box fan in the closet and set it up to blow on me, then fetched a towel from the bathroom. It felt wonderfully rough against my skin as Edward patted me dry. I opened my eyes to see him enjoying the view as my nipples hardened, the effect of the breeze from the fan and his attentions.

"Um," I started out hesitantly, "do you like it when I, uh, _talk_? Should I talk more?"

"Not in the way you mean… Bella, you don't have to put on a show for me," he tore his gaze from my nipples and looked up at me. "But it helps me when you talk, to remind me not to lose myself. And even more, I want you to feel comfortable telling me what you want, what you're imagining, what you're curious about. I've heard so many people wishing they could be honest with their lovers, their spouses, but too afraid of rejection. You have to know that I'll never do that to you."

I wanted to tell him it's all part of the same package - the secretiveness, the shyness, the silence. It's not easy to talk of these things, I wanted to say. But I asked another question instead.

"Don't you find some things people think about repulsive?" _Some thing I might think about?_ Not that I had the experience to have thought up anything particularly kinky.

"Some things I find unappealing, like… oh, cigarette fetishes or furry suits - don't ask - or food sex," he answered. "But I'm hardly in a position to find anything between consenting adults repulsive. After all, I drain the blood from animals and get a raging hard-on –"

"What?" I lifted my head to look at him.

"It's one of the many good reasons you shouldn't see me hunt yet –"

"Wait. Back up here. You and Emmett and Jasper go hunting and then have … some sort of circle jerk in the woods?"

He started laughing even before I finished. "No, no, let me try this again. _When you're with me_, I will drain the blood from animals and have a raging hard-on, which will be directed at you, Mrs. Cullen, so be prepared." He wagged his finger at me, seeing that I was about to speak, because this sounded pretty good, actually. He continued in a more serious tone, "And it won't be easily controlled, which is why you're continuing to stay home.

"When I'm with Jasper and Emmett, we just act … silly afterward. Relaxed. It's roughly akin to guys loosening up from a few beers after work, I think. Couples hunt together on their own."

"So when you have a family hunting trip -"

"All the women go together and all the men, or I'll hunt with Alice, say, and Jasper goes with someone else."

"So one day, you and I will be out hunting together and take down a herd of elk and then jump each other in the woods?"

"Yes."

I could tell that he found this idea not repulsive. Appealing, actually, from the evidence. He slowly drew circles with his index finger around the circumference of my left breast. Then he added in my right.

"Edward, are you drawing an infinity symbol around my boobs?"

"Mmmm. Appropriate, don't you think?" he answered. My body was making involuntary movements again.

"You're kinda geeky sometimes…. Um, Edward, could we, uh…" Some direct questions were just incredibly difficult for me.

He knew. "For someone who was so eager to take my virginity, you are terribly shy," he said. "Perhaps you need some visualization techniques." He moved his lips up to my ear, and murmured hypnotically: "Pretend you're you, and I'm me, and we're lying together naked on a bed in the middle of South Dakota. And you'd like me to take you, and you know that all you need to do is say, 'Edward, would you please fuck me silly again.'"

Crap, he was playing dirty once more. "Edward, would you please … fuck me silly again," I groaned, sounding more desperate than seductive.

"See, is that so hard?"

Ah, straight man for the 13-year-old's joke. This I could do. I looked him in the eyes, preparing for my assault. "Yes, it is," I said, grabbing his cock. "Now, what's your response?"

His moan went straight to my solar plexus. _"Yes."_

* * *

_A/N: Edward's playlist is not the same as mine, because I'm not as old as him either. What's the musical skeleton in your closet? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours_


	4. Chapter 4: ORD

_Disclaimer: It's Stephenie Meyer's world, and the opening weekend box office take proves it._

* * *

Chapter 4: ORD

_Loving, guiding, protecting her, as he had been doing ever since her being ten years old, her mind in so great a degree formed by his care, and her comfort depending upon his kindness ... what was there now to add?_

- "Mansfield Park"

* * *

The day promised to be muggy; the sky was thick with clouds, and the air was heavy even in the early morning. I was in a tank top and shorts, but Edward was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and tan pants, despite the heat. As we drove east on the expressway, the flat fields and meadows of butterfly weed turned into subdivisions and shopping strips - the suburbs of Chicago. But instead of following the signs downtown, where we were staying, we headed north. Soon, I could see the water of Lake Michigan, gray as the sky above, occasionally blocked by a college campus or an expansive house. Eventually, we turned off the road running along the lake into a neighborhood of more modest century-old houses shaded by mature trees.

We slowed down in on one particularly lovely block lined with reddish stone and brick two- and three-story houses with inviting porches and wide doorways. They had fanciful touches - turrets, gables, arches. My American history class had studied architectural styles, and I tried and failed to recall the name for these houses. Edward pulled into a curbside parking spot and silenced the engine of the Volvo.

"Shall we?" he asked quietly. He opened my door after walking, slowly for him, to my side of the car - there was a woman pushing a stroller along the sidewalk. He took my hand to help me out and kept holding on to it, guiding me to a walkway to a charming house, one of its corners replaced by a square tower.

"Richardsonian Romanesque," I blurted out, the name having come to me unexpectedly.

"Yes," he said with amusement. "High school wasn't wasted on you."

"So, whose house is this?" I asked as we stepped on the porch. "Are we visiting someone?"

"In a way, yes." He took a key from his pocket and opened the heavy wooden front door, ushering me inside. It was much cooler than outside; the walls of the house must be thick, like the Cullens' favorite hotels.

"You didn't answer my first question," I said.

"It was my parents' house," he said, a bit warily. Oh. He had grown up here; he had lived here before the flu tried to kill him, before - . I tried to keep my face composed, but I couldn't help being excited. I moved away from him so I could examine the room we were in more closely. This must have been called the parlor back then; the walls were paneled in a rich wood, and some of the windows were stained glass. The furniture looked to be of the same vintage as the house, armchairs and sofas in dark red with graceful lions' claw feet resting on a gently worn Persian rug. Had he played on the parquet floor in this room? Had he read -what, Dickens, Scott, Tennyson? - on the window seat overlooking the side yard? Had he climbed the oak tree on the front lawn? Was that tree even there 100 years ago?

I understood his wariness now. This house was a reminder of the passing years, years that would make their mark on human Bella while leaving him untouched.

"Whose house is it now? Aren't we trespassing?" I asked. It was obvious someone lived here - there were newspapers and magazines on the sofa table, flowers in a vase on the mantelpiece over the empty fireplace.

"Mine. Ours," he answered. "And we're not trespassing, because I gave the tenants notice. We're checking on our property. We rent it out, mostly to executives with families who need a place to stay while their houses are being renovated or are working for a year at company headquarters in Chicago. You'll be pleased to know that it's been a productive asset. The schools here are excellent, so it's almost always occupied."

He was playing with me now, so I gave him a look. "Is this how it appeared when you were ... here?" I asked.

"A bit. Esme didn't overhaul it as she did the Forks house. Most of this room is original. She had to redo the kitchen, of course, and make other changes - nobody wants an icebox anymore, and people today insist on closets and washing machines and showers. Imagine how much more work it was running a house back then; my mother had servants to help, of course, but still ...," he trailed off.

"Tell me more," I encouraged him. He hadn't said much to me about his parents, and I hadn't pushed him, unsure how much he would want to talk about them, how much he'd even remember.

He stepped next to me, sliding his hand around to the back of my neck, under my curtain of hair; I shivered in a familiar mix of pleasure and reaction to his cool touch. But his eyes were unfocused, looking at a past so distant that even my grandparents hadn't experienced it.

"It's frustrating to try to remember," he said quietly. "My mother must have been unusually perceptive, like you, because she suspected that Carlisle was ... something, in the hospital. She was also very intelligent, like you - yes, you," he added in response to the snort that I couldn't repress at his blatant effort to relieve my anxiety about going to a college that never would had admitted me on my merits alone.

"She went East to school too, to Bryn Mawr. It was very progressive at the time, and the rest of her life she was always intensely interested in politics. She was a suffragist, and it is a shame she never got to see the 19th Amendment go into effect. She met a young lawyer one summer, my father, and she didn't finish college. That was common then; people fell in love and married, and they weren't embarrassed about it," he said pointedly.

"I'm getting used to marriage," I said. "It does have its advantages."

"Really? What might those be?" he smirked.

I grinned up at him, and he went on, "Besides, in that era, she would have had few opportunities to use her degree. Though I've always imagined that she would have worked with Margaret Sanger when the time came."

"Why?"

"She had several miscarriages, after I was born, and they were agonizing. She wrote in her journals about them, how she longed for a reliable way to prevent them. She would have been eager to help other women avoid what she had to endure." He sighed and dropped his hand from my neck. "Here, let me show you the rest of the house."

We passed into the dining room, which had a shining table and eight chairs and a sideboard, all in a heavy dark wood. "This furniture was my parents', too," he said, running a finger along the carved top rail of one of the chairs. "We talked a lot here - we didn't have a rule against discussing politics at table, and my parents disagreed about the war and my joining the army. My mother was horrified at the prospect, as you know, but it was all I wanted to talk about."

I grimaced, remembering his eagerness to fight the newborns, and imagining all too well what his mother would have felt. "But then the war came to us, in a way, in the summer of 1918," he continued. "Several of my friends had brothers who were serving, and there was a naval base nearby." I looked at him in confusion, and he clarified for me, "On Lake Michigan. It's still there, in fact. The soldiers were carriers of the influenza, and it didn't take long for it to spread here. My parents and I had visited neighbors whose son was home on leave, and we fell ill with astonishing speed. You can't imagine what it was like - so many deaths, so fast, overwhelming the hospitals; people drowned in their own blood. Carlisle has told you; there's been nothing like it.

"What was odd was that my parents died. Most of the flu's victims were healthy young people like me. I should have left them, not they me. It was almost as if Fate was putting me in Carlisle's path."

"And mine," I whispered, chilled by the thought of what would have happened had events not perfectly aligned to allow Carlisle to save him.

"Yes," Edward said, and smiled. "Though I used to resent her. I used to think that it was a malignant fate, a harpy, who was throwing you in my arms, making your biggest threat your protector. Harpy or not, I can't quarrel with her now."

He took me to the study, now lined with books, that his parents used, and the modern kitchen, its only hint of the past being the narrow stairs that led into the cellar. "That's where the washing was done," he said. "My mother wrote about getting a mechanical wringer. Apparently it was a vast improvement in our lives." I shook my head at the foreignness of his mother's life, of his life. I didn't know what a wringer even did.

We returned to the parlor so we could mount the stairs that led to the second floor. The wood of the balustrade was cool under my hands. "My mother's, my father's," he said when we arrived upstairs, showing me two obviously Esme-decorated rooms at one end of the hallway, pale on pale.

"They were unhappy together, your parents?" I asked with a sudden pang. Even though I didn't know them, the thought saddened me.

He was puzzled for a millisecond. "Oh - that was common then, too, to have separate rooms, if you could," he said.

"It seems lonely."

"The rooms connected."

We turned around and headed to the other end of the hallway, passing a bathroom on the way.

"Was that there?" I asked.

He paused and looked at me incredulously. "Bella, are you asking if we had indoor plumbing? What sort of childhood do you think I had?"

"Well, for some reason, I don't have the same insight as you do into the lives of the privileged spawn of lawyers in suburban Chicago in 1915 or whatever."

"Yes, we indeed had toilets, and they even flushed. Emmett didn't, though," Edward said, his memories making him smile. "It was entertaining to see his reactions to all the modern technologies of the '30s."

We walked on to the other end of the hallway, and he opened a door. It was another bedroom, overlooking the front lawn and the oak I'd noticed before. "This was my room," he announced. I wondered if he had ever surreptitiously climbed into his window as he had so often crept into mine.

"But most of the furniture is different," he added. "My bed was burned when I contracted the flu."

The room was obviously occupied once more by a teenager, the dark blue walls covered with posters of sports teams and swimsuit models, a few of them with signatures and inscriptions made out to somebody named Sam. I could smell stale cigarette smoke, and seeing the flash of annoyance on Edward's face, I imagined that the odor must be much stronger for him.

"Were you a Bears fan too?" I asked.

"Hmm, they weren't around then," he said, distracted; perhaps he was reviewing a no-smoking clause in the lease. "If my mother had allowed posters on the walls, they would have been of cars and airplanes, though."

Figures. "Fast cars, no doubt," I said. "Twenty miles an hour."

"I'm not that old. Much faster - you wouldn't have liked my driving then, either. But then, it wouldn't have been nearly as safe as it is now."

"Hmphf." I made Charlie's noise of acquiescence.

I wandered over to a little glass-fronted bookcase in the corner, since it promised to be old enough. "Yours?" I asked. He nodded. Inside were shelves of leather-bound books, small enough to fit neatly into my hand. Shakespeare, of course, Scott, Stevenson, Dumas - he had been a bit of a romantic.

"You studied Latin," I noted.

"Of course. Everyone did."

"Do you remember any from then?"

"Amo, amas, amat," he recited lightly as he stepped over to me in front of the shelves. "Te amo," he added more slowly, breathing into my hair. I had a sudden overwhelming urge to touch him, trembling with it, and I turned toward him, breathing in the scent from his chest and sliding my hands up into his hair before lifting my face to his. He bent his knees so he could press his lips to the side of my neck, and then moved up to my ear.

"Te amo," he breathed again, and then his lips traveled along my jaw and up to my mouth. His hands weren't still either, sliding over the straps of my tank top, down my ribs to my waist and hips. They paused at the bare skin on my back, chilling me for an instant; I gasped and his hands immediately moved away. He then ran his fingers over my shorts, knowing they were too cold to go under my waistband, instead following the curve of my bottom, holding me up, pressing me to him, our thighs touching. I moaned despite myself, and to my frustration, he pulled back from my parted lips.

"This seems to be our default activity when we're in a room by ourselves these days," Edward said. "But I don't think our tenants would appreciate it if we used their shower, even if it is ours."

"Doesn't your conscience bother you?" I asked, a bit petulantly.

"Constantly. Why?"

"You are still such a tease," I said, stepping away from him reluctantly. Despite, or because of, my session with his cold hands, I could feel perspiration prickling in my hair. "At least we'll be alone in a room again soon enough."

His answering smile was enough of a promise to keep my pulse elevated as we walked downstairs.

* * *

A short while later, we were in a suburban downtown of old storefronts where the broker who oversaw the house had her office. Edward pulled the car into a spot around the corner from the main street, and he reached into the back seat to grab a tan suit jacket and a tie. He flipped up the collar of his white shirt and deftly knotted the tie, and my stomach unexpectedly curled - there was something so beautiful about the way his hands moved, his look of concentration. I realized that I had never seen him do this in front of me before because my reluctance to let him spend money on me had limited his opportunities to dress up as well.

The knot was perfect, I imagined, though I was no judge. He stepped out of the car to shrug into the jacket, and again, I was dazed. He suddenly looked years older, cool and unruffled despite the mugginess, someone you could imagine casually buying and selling millions of shares in an instant or overseeing a hostile takeover. Well, he did have the stock portfolio, with Alice as his inside trader.

He ducked his head back into the car, and took in my expression.

"Bella, are you all right?"

"You look amazing," I breathed, shamelessly gawking at him.

"Thank you," he said, showing me how to take a compliment gracefully. He came around to my door, and as he helped me out, he added, "I guess I should wear a suit more often." He gave me a smirk. "Which means that you should let me take you to nicer restaurants."

As we walked along the sidewalk toward the main road, I said, "Sam is so busted, I bet."

He laughed. "No, these months of being constantly on guard in case your father decided to burst into your bedroom have given me a much greater sympathy for experimenting teenagers."

We had reached the corner, and he nodded toward a real estate office across the street. "That's the broker's office," he said. "Do you want to come with me? It won't take me long."

_To dazzle her_, I added mentally. "No, you'll bend her to your will faster without me," I said. I could see a coffee place among the expensive clothing and furniture boutiques that lined the street. "I'll wait in there," I said, pointing. "I could use a drink."

He stroked my cheek and then crossed over to the broker's office. I walked over to the cafe and sighed automatically in relief as I stepped into the air-conditioned interior. It wasn't crowded, just a few young mothers with sleeping babies in strollers sitting and chatting at round wood tables. I went to the counter and ordered an iced tea and a muffin from the love-patched college student working here for the summer. He stared at me longer than necessary, and I wondered if I looked as hot and bothered as I felt from the kissing and this new vision of my husband that I had just seen.

I took my drink over to a table, then grabbed a magazine from a rack on the wall. Dartmouth students probably read The New Yorker, right? I tried to focus on the articles inside, but my mind kept drifting to Edward and our "default activities," and I started worrying again about how I was going to manage college work when all I could think about was - I abruptly noticed the coffee guy staring at me again; his gaze reminded me of the reaction that Mike Newton and other boys had to me when I arrived at Forks High, mystifying to me because I had passed through the school hallways unnoticed and unremarked in Phoenix.

A conversation I'd had with Edward came back to me - when I'd told him that his family's presence was turning Jacob and his friends into giant dogs, that no matter how hard the Cullens tried to be inconspicuous in my world, they transformed it despite themselves. Could his presence have done the same to me? Well, not the giant dogs part, of course, but had changed me physically somehow, heightened my appeal to teenage boys, especially one who was a century old? Perhaps it just happened that I had the right receptors for Edward's freaky biochemistry, ones whose reactions formed me for him.

It made me think of the end of "Mansfield Park," when Austen writes that Fanny and Edmund are perfect together because she was his creature – he had shaped her tastes, and she was totally dependent on him. I'd always hated that. What a boring marriage that was going to be.

I crumbled the edges of the muffin a bit as I considered this. That wouldn't be us, I assured myself. But I was perfect for him in so many ways. It didn't explain my silent mind, but the scent, the electric current that was completed when we touched, could be the result of some sort of physical catalyst - a product of biology rather than the fate Edward had invoked.

Hmm, I wondered what Edward would think of my theory. He wouldn't appreciate the wolf comparison, I thought with a grin.

My grin stayed on my face as the man in question came through the door, and I only vaguely noticed that the conversations of the other customers went silent as he walked to my table. Edward, though, looked angry, his eyes narrowed and glaring at the boy behind the counter.

He leaned down and put his hand on the back of my head to pull me tight to him as he kissed me long and hard - possessively. As he sat down, I said, "Not so inconspicuous," somewhat breathlessly. "What's up?"

"I'm having a natural reaction to seeing you naked, however inaccurately imagined," he said, his eyes flickering to Mr. Love Patch.

"Oh. That bad?" I tried and failed to feel resentful about being kissed out of a desire to show ownership. I was hopeless. But I also knew that there would be many more instances calling for Bella-possessiveness than Edward-possessiveness in the future.

"It was a very strong image, and it didn't do you justice. His thoughts are running on quite a different track now," he said with some satisfaction. He looked down at my crumbled muffin. "I can see why you didn't eat that. Are you ready to go?"

As we got back into the car, Edward's phone vibrated and he flipped it open. "Text from Alice!" he announced cheerfully. "Let's find out where we're going ... Apparently, we're visiting a store in Evanston, and you will find something you love there. Or maybe that I'll love on you. I can't tell from her syntax," he said, and turned to me. "Shall we indulge her? You don't have to obey all her whims."

_Or that he'll love on me_. "Actually, I don't mind," I said. "I'm running out of clothes … It is a clothing store, isn't it?"

It was, a ramshackle shop on a street near the lakefront, its paint peeling, its wood floors scuffed. Jazz from the student radio station was playing inside. It seemed an odd choice for Alice, this shop with ethnic jewelry and simple, cheap cotton clothing. But then I saw the retro deep blue sundress, with wide straps that crossed in the back and a fitted bodice and full skirt and knew that it was what she had envisioned me wearing, what she had envisioned Edward liking.

I tried it on and came out of the dressing room to find him leaning against a display case and checking stock quotes on his phone, oblivious to the two teenage girls whispering together in a corner and staring at him. _Shouldn't you ladies be in school?_ I thought, irritated. At the same time, another part of me was turned on by seeing their attraction to Edward. Or maybe I was turned on just by seeing him.

"My sister is a genius," Edward said as I twirled in front of him. "I think she meant we'd both like it. Are there more like that?"

There were, and I picked a few out. Since I'd had to pack heavy clothes for our stay in the mountains, I didn't have enough to wear in the heat. Afterward, I looked at the store's collection of jewelry, seeing a delicate necklace of silver and enamel fashioned to look like a circle of ivy; it would look charming against Alice's collarbones.

"Does she … have a reaction to silver?" I asked Edward, half in jest. You never know what myths might actually be true, after all. He snorted.

As soon as I knew I could buy it for her, Edward's cell vibrated. As he retrieved it from his jacket pocket, I asked, "Alice?"

He turned the screen so I could see it. "Yes!" her text read.

Buying for Alice meant never having to ask about return policies.

* * *

We drove back down the lakeside drive toward Chicago, at some points the towers of downtown bulging out into the lake, denser and bigger than Seattle, the black form of the Hancock building looming. I saw with people swimming in the gray water. I wondered if it was any warmer than the ocean off La Push. Edward turned off the drive and soon pulled up to an elegant old hotel on the north end of downtown.

The Cullens were apparently longtime patrons of the hotel. The manager came out to effusively greet Edward, still looking cool and gorgeous and extraordinarily assured in his suit, especially in contrast to me in my shorts and tank top. I'd have to change right away. Edward introduced me, and I could see a flash of speculation, quickly suppressed by his training, on the manager's face.

As we made our way through the blandly plush lobby to the elevators, I demanded, "Okay, what was he thinking?"

"The provisions of the Mann Act and that I'm a cradle robber," Edward said, "and he's right."

"You could have told him that you married an older woman," I said, "and that would be right too."

Our suitcases and bags were waiting for us in our room overlooking the lake, and I hurried over to them to pull out one of my new dresses. "What's on the agenda?" I asked. I knew what my first choice would be, but I wouldn't see much of the city that way. And as I suspected, he had plans.

"I know you said there was only one human thing you wanted to experience, but since you've given me a little time, I can think of some others that you might miss, though you don't realize it now," he said as he pulled his tie off. I paused to watch him - his movements were as mesmerizing now as they had been in the car earlier. "You'll see things differently after."

"In what way?"

"Well, literally. Some of the paintings you admire now you'll find are no longer beautiful to your eyes. And you'll appreciate other paintings that you didn't before…."

As he talked, I changed into my new dress, and his voice trailed off. It made me feel unaccountably bold. I smirked at him before I unnecessarily wriggled my body and pulled the blue fabric down over my bare torso; I didn't need a bra in this. I would never get over having the power to make him forget what he meant to say - it was such a thrill after so many months of frustration and denial and insecurity to see him affected by me.

"Um…," he managed to continue, "it would be useful for you to experience yourself, now, some human masterpieces so you understand what people are talking about later."

Something he said struck me oddly. "Human masterpieces?" I asked. "Are there vampire masterpieces?"

"Yes, though you won't see them today unless the museum has made some acquisitions I'm not aware of," he said, still staring at me.

"Zip me up?" I asked as innocently as I could. He came over to me, but he didn't zip me up. Instead he put his hands on my hips and kissed me between my bare shoulder blades, then lifted his head and murmured against my neck, "If it weren't for our temperature problem, do you know what I'd do right now?" I shook my head, suddenly unable to speak. "I'd slide my hands into this sexy new dress and around your waist, and run them up your body until I had one of your beautiful breasts in each palm, and I'd touch them until all you could think about was me having my way with you on that bed over there."

I moaned a bit and swayed against him. God, I thought, that's all I can think about now, even without any of that. Then the sudden purr of zipper teeth meshing pulled out of my daze, and I heard him chuckle.

"Payback is delicious," Edward said. But his voice was strained as he added, "Let's go, now, before I make those boyshorts you flashed me disappear."

His grasp of underwear nomenclature was impressive.

The Art Institute was a trek, but it felt good to move my legs after so much time in the car, and I could wrap an arm around Edward's waist when I needed to cool off. We stopped along the way so I could get lunch.

Edward watched me censoriously as I ate a slice of pizza. "What? This is a Chicago specialty, so I should definitely eat some here," I said. "I think you'll never get over having to take that bite of pizza in the cafeteria."

"No, I probably won't," he agreed. "It was truly revolting."

"Did you never have pizza growing up?" I asked. I couldn't imagine a time without pizza.

"No, what we ate was very, I suppose, English," he answered. "There was no Italian, no Chinese, no Japanese. There weren't even many vegetables. But we did have food that you'd find exotic – prairie chicken, pheasant, partridge, fish from the lake that don't exist anymore. I don't remember eating them – I just know because my mother would occasionally write about cooking in her journals."

"Did you have venison?"

"Yes. And I don't imagine it was my favorite then, either."

After my lunch, we strolled through Grant Park along the lake to the Art Institute. As we walked between two bronze lions and up the steps to one of the arched doorways of the museum, I looked at him inquiringly. He knew what I was asking.

"Yes, I did come here as a boy," he answered. "My mother and I would visit my father in his law office downtown, and come here afterward. Though I can't remember what I saw, really. And school trips - we had to do a lot of sketching, I think."

I was surprised by the museum's collection. There were so many paintings here that I had seen reproduced endlessly on posters and cards, and I had a feeling of unwarranted déjà vu looking at them, the Monets, the Renoirs, the Van Goghs. I stopped in front of a painting that was new to me, of a cobblestone street in Paris, with people in 19th-century dress carrying umbrellas to protect themselves from the light rain. It looked almost like a photograph, and so large that you felt you could step into it. Edward would fit in perfectly there, I realized, though I snickered internally at the thought of him in a top hat.

He noticed my absorption in the painting and came to stand behind me so that he could whisper in my ear. "That," he murmured, "is a perfect example of what I was saying. Caillebotte is trying to be photographic and aims for perfect reality. But he's a human, so he can't, and we notice the imperfections. It's irritating in its way. That explains why we're drawn to color rather than line most of the time. I'm sure this is a marvelous painting, yet I can't enjoy it the same way as you." I realized that most of the paintings in the Forks house, apart from the ones in Carlisle's study, demonstrated that exactly - mixes of striking colors set off by the white walls.

Since I'd never ridden a subway before, we took a train back to the hotel. It was hot, though, and I felt grimy when I got back into the fresh air. "I'm taking a shower," I announced when we stepped into our room's air-conditioned chill, which perversely made me perspire all the more. "I know you don't need to, but I'm boiling."

"Would you like me to scrub your back?" Edward asked. He smiled invitingly. _Well, yes, now that you mention it ..._

I nodded happily at him.

"Hmm, let me start the water, then."

I waited a few minutes, calculating that he must have been pretty warm already from the heat outside, before I stripped off my damp clothes and went into the bathroom. The room was already filled with steam; the water must be at the highest setting. He had heard me, and I heard the taps squeal faintly as he adjusted them.

"May I?" I called out, politely.

"Mmm-hmm."

The shower, I noticed in passing, was respectably big, but as always, the sight of him naked trumped everything else. He was so beautiful wet. Images of him striding from the ocean at Isle Esme were marked indelibly on my mind. He moved aside so I could stand under the showerhead, staring at me hungrily as I raised my arms and let the water stream down my shoulders, my collarbones, the valley between my breasts. We had made love that morning in the electric blankets, and it felt like an eternity ago now. I turned my back to him and his wet, warm hands slid down, framing my spine, stopping on the flesh of my ass, cupping, massaging. I could melt in the sensation of his fingers pressing oh so gently for him into my skin, nearly rough for me, my own moisture competing with the shower's. I stepped back from the spray so I could feel him solid and thick on my back.

"Sweetheart, can we try again?" he said in my ear. I nodded, though hesitantly. Having his tongue on me was becoming, well, not more bearable, because that implied that it was unpleasant, and it was far from that, but less overwhelming. I was able to last a little longer each time before I had to squirm away, before my body became convinced that the sensation was too much and I had to ask Edward to stop.

I stepped back to the tiles as he leaned out of the shower to grab a folded towel, which he put behind my head in consideration of my tendency to slam it into the wall. He dropped to his knees, and I took a deep breath that I immediately released with a moan as he kissed my clit. I wobbled a bit at the sensation shooting up my body, and he put an arm around my hips to steady me before getting back to work. His tongue teased me for a while, then the pressure grew steadier, and I pressed my head back against the towel, one hand pushing against the wall next to me, the other clutching his hair and making him groan against me. That familiar sensation of an impending explosion built up and my body involuntarily tensed up, ready to flee.

"Edward," I said, loosening my hand from his hair, "let me go."

He stopped and pulled back, but this time, he didn't release me. His arm stayed wrapped around my hips, and he looked up at me.

"Bella, let _yourself_ go," he urged me, his voice hoarse. "You can do this for me. I did it for you."

I stared at him, watching the water ricocheting off his back like rain hitting a rock. _I did it for you_. He had - he had overcome his deep-seated, and perfectly rational, fears about ripping me apart if we had a physical relationship. Every time he touched me was a reminder of how much he had to control fingers, hands, lips, pushing in ... and I was holding on to an irrational worry about - what, I didn't know, exactly. It was no longer a human-vampire thing, I realized. Was it prudishness holding me back? Embarrassment? Why was I embarrassed in front of a man who so often said how beautiful he found me, his one blind spot?

I nodded again, giving him permission, and his tongue was back on me, making me shudder and gasp once more. And suddenly, I realized that I was going to come, that I could hold on long enough to come. The feeling that rolled through me then was like no other, and my cry was long and fierce, my eyes screwed shut, my body remaining upright only because he held me in place.

My eyes slowly opened, and I lifted my head, letting the towel fall behind my back. Edward moved his arms from my hips and rose to his feet so he was facing me.

His words were unexpected. "Happy birthday," he said impishly.

"What? Oh, it is," I said in realization. "Is this my present? It's perfect." I was delighted, because after last year I never wanted to celebrate my birthday again, and Edward knew it. "In fact, you better not have gotten me anything else," I said, rather ungraciously.

"I haven't," he said. "Scout's honor." He looked at my expression and went on, "No, I was never a Boy Scout. I'm not morally straight."

He paused and grinned at me. "But this is such a nice present for me to give that it can be your birthday every day from now on if you want."

I stared at him again. I'd never seen him so giddy before. I wondered if that's the way I looked after I'd first made him come with my mouth.

"You look drunk," I said in amazement. "In fact, you're intoxicated by the very presence of … my pussy," I added, giggling, remembering possibly the most arrogant sentence ever spoken by a boy to a girl in history.

But instead of groaning at my bad line, he inhaled hard at my words, and I realized I had never said _that _before. A weapon for my arsenal, I thought smugly as I took him into my hand, stroking his hard length gently a few times as he moaned softly and I contemplated my next move. The soap dish was at my elbow.

My hands left him briefly to lather up, and he lifted an eyebrow. "You might not need so much," he suggested.

"You're speaking from experience?" He shrugged in acknowledgment.

"Tell me more," I said as I squeezed him with my soapy hands, which indeed slipped off him. I rinsed off one of my hands in the spray. Better. I pressed his length into my torso, rubbing him against my skin.

"Every day, more than every day, since I returned until our wedding I was wasting finite resources because you were driving me crazy," he breathed with some difficulty. "My showers were a running joke for Emmett. It was the only place to get a modicum of privacy." He broke off and looked down at my hands. "Jesus, Bella, that feels good. Yes, squeeze me there," he murmured as I moved one hand to his sac, and I moaned in turn to hear his ragged breaths, to hear him tell me what felt good to him. His face was ever-changing, from near grimaces to wonderment as he watched my hands. "Your fingers are perfect on me …. Bella, I'm going -"

"I know. I want you to." He groaned in answer, his hand coming up, as mine had, to push against the tile wall. His release spread across my stomach, onto my breasts. I ran a hand between them before it could wash away, and put a finger in my mouth. His breaths slowed as he watched me taste him, indescribable on my tongue.

He leaned down, his forehead on my hairline, and murmured, "I think you'll need more than that for dinner."

* * *

I was still in a haze as we strolled, north this time, to look for a restaurant. I was wearing another new sundress, this one in black, in hopes that I would look less juvenile next to Edward, still in his suit jacket. It continued to be muggy, but cooling as the sky darkened. As we left the downtown, the buildings started to shrink to a more human scale, and I had a question.

"In the shower," I started when we were on an unpopulated stretch of sidewalk, "you said that … it was every day since you'd come back from Italy. Not before that?"

He smiled at my shy imprecision. "Every day that I touched myself?" he asked for unnecessary clarification.

"Um, yeah," I mumbled.

"Yes. Before then I was dead, and before I left you, I was frightened. And before that, before I met you, I was … asleep. I woke up occasionally and took care of myself, but that was it."

"You were Sleeping Beauty, then? I can see that."

"That makes you Princess Charming, you realize."

"I can't see that."

We came to a storefront restaurant crowded with people. I couldn't see a sign, but a menu was posted on the window, and Edward scanned it in an instant. "The food looks good," he said.

"How would you know?"

He shrugged, and I assented. The restaurant didn't look fancy enough for me to justify objecting to it - the waiters were in simple black outfits, the tables were close together, and the walls were plain and whitewashed. But I could see as we went inside that the patrons were expensively, if casually, dressed; they looked as if they were able to afford regular massages. All the tables seemed occupied, but I knew that wouldn't be problem for Edward. And it wasn't - the hostess, after a few seconds of Edward's brand of persuasion, managed to find us a table, to the annoyance of the would-be diners waiting at the bar.

I looked up from the menu when the waiter arrived. With his sandy hair and eager expression, he looked like a slightly older version of Mike Newton.

"Good evening," the waiter started his spiel, concentrating his attention on me. "Have you been here before?" I shook my head no, and he continued on, "Let me tell you how it works here. Everything is on …." He turned to look at Edward, who was gazing at him politely, and stopped abruptly, looking as if he'd forgotten the alphabet and perhaps even his own name. I suddenly realized that he looked like Mike Newton - if Mike Newton were gay. I had to suppress a giggle, remembering our conversation in the car in South Dakota.

Edward maintained his polite gaze, but I knew him well enough to know that he was suppressing a smile too. "Everything is on the menu?" Edward prompted pseudo-Mike. "There are no specials?"

"Uh, yes, that's right," the waiter flailed. "The chef, uh, writes a new menu every day."

"Thank you for telling us," Edward said gently. "We'll be ready in a few minutes. But if you don't mind, my wife needs her glass refilled."

It was true. I was so parched from our shower that I had already emptied my water glass and had been eyeing Edward's. "Of course," the poor waiter said before stumbling away. "Right away."

It had never occurred to me before – my Phoenix school was big enough to have a gay students group, but I supposed that gay population of a small-town high school would be either non-existent or very closeted, so I'd never had the opportunity to see this sort of reaction to Edward. I stared at him. "Does this happen a lot?' I asked. Then I had another thought. "Was he picturing you naked?"

He laughed. "No, he was being rather … romantic, I guess you would say. And he wondered who my colorist was. It would be hard to be offended at his thoughts – unlike the boy at the coffee bar."

"I don't like it. Maybe I should bare my teeth at him when he comes back."

The waiter was able to hold it together enough to take our order. I knew Edward would push me to try something I'd never had before. Well, that meant I could skip the fish. I ordered a tomato salad and short ribs, and he naturally ordered more expensively, a foie gras appetizer and some sort of duck entree. Could I really eat a duck?

"A salad?" Edward asked with some disapproval when the waiter left.

"Hey, I've spent the past few days without any vegetables - a small taste of your vegetable-deprived childhood. I probably have a vitamin deficiency."

It turned out that the salad was one of the best things I had ever tasted. As were the rest of the dishes. The duck didn't freak me out, and after I got over the idea that I was eating liver, the foie gras was fantastic, served with a tiny glass of thick wine that was the occasional color of Edward's eyes. Since the tables were close enough together to make conversations about, say, 1918, a bit dangerous, we mostly talked about school.

"So what are the college experiences that you're so eager for me to try?" I asked. "Frat party?"

"Definitely not," he growled.

"Binge drinking? Keg party in the freshman dorm? Sorority rush?"

He rolled his eyes at me.

"Taking Adderall to make it through finals?"

He looked thoughtful. "You know, seeing you high would be quite amusing…."

"Yeah, let's make that a family occasion," I said sarcastically. I just couldn't picture Edward giving me a joint. "Sexual experimentation?"

"Definitely," he purred, managing to infuse that one word with so much lust that I heard roaring in my ears. We should certainly talk about that – somewhere else. I hoped he'd bring that up soon; I wasn't sure that I'd be able to broach the subject myself.

"Um," I stuttered. "Streaking?"

"I haven't looked into whether there's a tradition of streaking at Dartmouth." His expression was a bit strange.

"Is it a tradition somewhere else?" I asked. "Somewhere you've been?"

He hesitated, then nodded. "Princeton. The students would run across campus naked on the night the first snow falls, and well, going without clothes in the snow isn't particularly uncomfortable for us…"

I shivered, not at the thought of snow so much, but at the thought that we could make love in the snow someday. We could make love on the tundra under the aurora borealis, _and I wouldn't be cold_.

I shook my head to clear it. "Was this before or after Princeton went co-ed?" I asked.

"After."

I narrowed my eyes at him, jealously suddenly raging. It was time for Bella-possessiveness. If I could have growled I would have.

"Never again," I declared. If there was a tradition of streaking at Dartmouth, he wasn't going to be perpetuating it.

The dishes were small, but so rich that I couldn't finish half of them. The waiter looked a bit disappointed as he came to check on us.

"You didn't like the duck?" he asked Edward with concern.

"He's watching his figure," I said, a bit more acidly that I intended. The waiter flushed, and I felt guilty for my bitchiness. I had been given this wonderful gift, one far beyond anything I deserved, and now I was being petty. But I didn't want to share.

Edward insisted on dessert, and though I should have expected it, all things considered, I was still surprised when the pear tart arrived with a candle burning on it. Edward raised his hands, absolving himself. "Alice," we said simultaneously.

Thank goodness this wasn't an Applebee's. There was no singing.

By the time we left the restaurant, a wind had started up, and the clouds had mostly scuttled off. I could even see a few stars. We headed east toward the lake, and Edward led me to a park along its shore. The waves splashed up against a tumble of stones.

We took a seat on one of the rocks, which was more like a slab of concrete. A handful of other couples were also watching the waves, but not close by. I leaned back into Edward's chest and looked out at the water and the luminous high-rises further south.

"Did you swim here?" I asked him, shivering at the thought.

"Yes. It was cold. We also sailed – a friend had a little boat we could take out." He searched his memory for anything else he could tell me. There were dances, and picnics, and teas, and sometimes political meetings with his mother. His voice slipped into a more formal register as he talked about his childhood; it was like listening to a character from a Wharton novel.

"Do you vote?" I asked. As I did so, I realized that I was pretty tardy in bringing up the subject. Well, it was too late to do anything about it now.

"None of us do – though if we did it would be for the candidate who's best on the environment. You realize that we try to stay as much out of official records as possible, for obvious reasons. We forge everything. I've never had a legitimate driver's license, for example. If you have one, or if you vote, you get called for jury duty, and what if the trial occurs during a streak of sunny days? Or you get sequestered?"

I could see that. "But you'd be perfect on a jury," I observed. "You'd always have the right verdict."

"You would think that, but no."

"Why?"

"There's a difference between knowing somebody did something, and justice. There are rules of evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct, and making sure that the former are obeyed and the latter is punished is more important than sending someone to jail. Just as what I did when I … left Carlisle wasn't justice either. I killed people who were criminals, true, who I know had done terrible things, but even the most horrible lowlife could have extenuating circumstances. It's not my role to be an executioner."

We were silent for a while. My light-hearted question had elicited such a serious answer. I had never thought of it that way.

"Have you ever voted?" he asked me.

"Once, last November. Charlie had a very decided opinion about the county DA's race, so I did it for him." I barely remembered going to the polling station, in the Forks elementary school gym. Last November. No. New subject. "What did you do when there was the draft?"

"That was difficult. Sometimes we pretended to be as young as possible, and Carlisle as old as possible. We would move every year to avoid questions. Sometimes we lived abroad. The idea of the medical examination…. So you can see, we're killers, forgers, thieves, liars, and shirkers of our civic duty. Are you sure you want to do this?"

"You do give to charity, though," I pointed out.

"Especially to Ivy League schools."

"Thank goodness, because I'm a scholarship student."

"And we pay taxes. We can avoid death, in a sense, but not taxes."

I could see that I wouldn't get anything more serious out of him tonight, so I thought we might as well follow the example of the other couples on the rocks and make out. Which we did with great enjoyment for a long while, our kisses heated with the knowledge that our explorations of each other were limited by public propriety and about 25 degrees. Eventually, though, I got cold and stiff on the rock. He noticed, helping me up and slipping off his jacket to give to me.

"What shall we do when we get back to the hotel?" I said, knowing full well.

"I think I should give you your present again," he said slyly. "It_ is_ still your birthday."

* * *

_A/N: You fessed up to Bananarama and Pussycat Dolls (both guilty pleasures for me, too), so I'll have to cop to having Britney Spears's "Toxic" next to my CMJ bands. _

_Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the sweet reviews! _


	5. Chapter 5: LGA

_Disclaimer: It belongs to Stephenie Meyer._

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* * *

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Chapter 5: LGA

The door at the end of the hotel corridor opened just as we stepped off the elevator onto the 15th floor, and a blur rushed toward me, stopping just as I drew a breath to scream.

"Alice!" My shriek resolved into her name. "I _knew_ you were going to do this, and you still scared the hell out of me."

"What, you're psychic now?" Alice said, scoffing, but giving me a properly restrained embrace.

"No, you're just predictable," I told her. "It's great to see you, though."

"Alice," Edward said, looking angry. _"Really_."

"Well, it's nice to see you, too," Alice said, wrinkling her nose at Edward before wrapping her arms around him, lifting him up and twirling him around until he relented and laughed. I got out of their way and glanced over to the only other door on the corridor to make sure no heads were peeking out. It was quite a spectacle, after all, to see this tiny woman spinning around a man twice her size.

Alice set Edward down and said, "Come on in, we've all been hanging out in the suite because the weather's been _inconvenient_ this afternoon. It will be fine the rest of the time we're here, but today was annoying." Edward and I had seen this ourselves; though the sky was thick with threatening clouds and the air heavy with humidity, some errant rays of the setting sun lighted up the broad New York City skyline when we came upon it suddenly as we crested a rise on the expressway in New Jersey.

There was the Chrysler building, the Empire State, the hole where the World Trade Center had been, and then the city vanished as the road dipped, reappearing when we ascended again, then disappearing as we entered the Lincoln Tunnel. The sky had darkened completely by the time we'd maneuvered around the traffic of Manhattan and pulled up at our hotel on the Upper East Side, near the museums, Edward said.

It was probably also predictable that the siblings had a gorgeous suite, a pale yellow and white sitting room flanked by two bedrooms and a huge terrace with a view of Central Park at one end. Emmett hummed his carousel song and gave me a nearly bone-crushing hug that prompted another rebuke from Edward; Jasper was careful; Rosalie had returned to her usual chilly self, and offered a double air kiss. The gratitude – or guilt - that induced her warm welcome on our return from Rio had apparently dissipated, to my regret. On the other hand, I wasn't sure if Rosalie was consistently affectionate with anybody besides Emmett.

We sat down on the green sofas and after I told Alice off about the candle incident, the talk immediately turned to the race. Rosalie won, perhaps also predictably, making it to the city in under 28 hours. "Not a record," Emmett noted, making Rosalie huff and complain about road construction and sabotage.

"So there _was_ sabotage," I said, and a flurry of stories burst out: the line that snapped on Jasper's motorcycle, the airbag that had mysteriously engaged while Alice was inside a service station on a desolate stretch of road paying for gas, the dashboard lights that malfunctioned and drove Rosalie crazy until she stopped to repair them. Emmett's story trumped them all: his spare tire had gotten loose while he was driving through North Dakota, and he'd looked over to see it bouncing off the road and rolling rapidly across a sloping pasture, stopping only when it hit a very surprised cow. Her cow friends didn't much like Emmett's jogging through their meal.

"I had to retrieve the spare since I'd be up shit's creek if I got a flat, and getting it took forever, because I could be seen from the road and I couldn't just knock the stupid things over to get them out of my way, and what do I know about cows?" Emmett groused. "Nobody's come clean to admit he did it, though I have my money on Jasper."

Jasper languidly disclaimed responsibility; obviously the accusation had been made several times before. Edward squeezed my hand, making me think.

"Didn't you have cows on your farm?" I asked Emmett, surprised by his bovine inexperience.

"Naw, we would have been too poor for cows," he answered. "We probably had chickens, and pigs if we were lucky." I nodded, remembering Edward saying how Emmett had had to adjust to city life. I also had to adjust my mental image of Emmett's childhood; he seemed so comfortable with the Cullens' wealth, but perhaps he'd had the same difficulties coming to grips with it as I was having.

"Bella," Alice interrupted, "are you on board with what we're doing tonight?" I nodded again – as we were driving in, Edward had said that Alice had found out that the band we'd planned to go see in Tacoma the weekend of the newborn attack was playing at a club in Brooklyn, and would I like to go to the show?

"Brooklyn?" I had asked.

"Yes. We're quite the old fogeys, staying in Manhattan."

Alice continued on. "Perfect. I've left your outfit for the evening in your room, on a chair, you can't miss it. I would have put it on the bed but you'll be using -"

"Alice," I cut her off hastily, then added, perplexed, "Wait, how did you get in our –" Rosalie sniggered at me and I realized my idiocy and went on, "No, no, I don't know why I'm even asking." I got up and stretched, still stiff from the car ride. "Okay, I'm just going to get a drink of water."

"Raid the bar!" Emmett called out. "That way we don't have to do it ourselves."

My entrenched frugality resisted his suggestion, and I shook my head. "Wouldn't it be more useful if I mess up your bathroom?" I asked.

"Oh, we've done that already," Emmett snorted, earning him an elbow from Rosalie. I sighed and went to fetch a glass.

When I returned to sit next to Edward, Alice was telling him, "You're dining in the East Village, and that will work out perfectly. And Jasper has your ID, Bella –"

A laminated rectangle landed on my lap, gentle as a butterfly, my picture staring up at me. A New York State driver's license showed one Bella Cullen turning 21 just that week. I remembered the picture – Jasper had taken it a few days before the wedding, noting that I'd need a new passport afterward, and indeed he'd confiscated my old passport when I'd returned from Rio. I hadn't realized he'd be making me fake ID's, though I knew that Cullens were in frequent need of documents.

"I live here at the hotel, I see," I said, looking at the address.

"So you know where to go in case you get lost," Jasper teased me.

I tried and failed to imagine a situation in which Edward allowed me to get lost in New York City. "I'll really need this tonight?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," Alice said confidently, and then Rosalie added, "Not that you should navigate a crowded club and drink at the same time, Bella."

While I couldn't argue with that, Rosalie's tone stung. "Rosalie," Edward started, ready to defend me, but it wasn't worth it, so this time I squeezed his hand, and he looked at me instead.

"Shall we go to our room, and I can see what Alice has decreed for me to wear tonight?" I suggested. He nodded and we stood up to leave, an air of tension now in the suite.

"Actually, Rose picked out your shirt," Alice said quietly. "You're going to love it."

"Oh," I said, taken aback. "Thank you, Rosalie."

She shrugged, and more confused than ever about my sister-in-law's attitude, I left with Edward.

* * *

Our own room was several floors lower and several multiples of square feet smaller than the suite. Edward used one of the heavy, ornate keys we'd been given when we checked in to open the door – no vampire tricks.

We kicked off our shoes, and I looked around at the room's pale green walls and cream furniture, the duvet folded at the foot of the bed, our bags neatly arrayed in a corner. "We've got a terrace, too!" I said gleefully, and practically ran to open the French doors, letting in a gust of humid air. The terrace had a view of the park and slices of the city; leaning over the stone balustrade, I could see cars moving below, but I couldn't hear them.

When I spun around to make my way back into our room, Edward was standing a few steps away next to a chaise, watching me, obviously breathing a sigh of relief that I hadn't tumbled off the terrace. I gave him a look – _see, I'm fine!_ - and he shrugged, unapologetic.

"We have a few minutes before we need to change and leave. Do you want to send a note to Renee or Charlie?" he asked as we walked back inside. He sounded a bit disappointed; there was no time for long showers, no time for blankets to heat up.

But after a long day of driving, I needed more than that – he needed more than that. I wanted to play with him, and I had an idea. So I took a deep breath. "I think there's one thing we can do, uh, together, without the help of hot water or electricity," I said slowly, hesitantly, and stopped, seemingly abashed.

"Sweetheart, remember, anything," he said soothingly, intent on making me comfortable. "What are you thinking of?"

_Thank you for asking._ "Ice pops," I said, then paused as his expression shifted from inquiring to astonished to, well, eager. He really was such a guy sometimes. "Is that too much like food sex?" I asked disingenuously.

"This sounds exactly like the kind of food sex I'd approve of," he said, playful now himself.

He let me push him to sitting on the bed, a flash of calculation crossing his face, assessing this position as I stood before him. "I'm not sure about this," he said. It was his turn to be hesitant, though his uncertainty was real. "My hands will be closer to you this way."

"But I'd like you to touch me. Will you try?" I breathed, then remembered I was wearing a blouse that left my arms bare. "I'll get a sweater." Edward nodded and I went over to my bag to pull out one of my sweaters from Jackson Hole. I returned to kneel on the rug at his feet; I had started unbuttoning his jeans when he put his hand on mine, stilling my fingers.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" His voice was amused. I was baffled as I stared up at him. "Don't I get a little foreplay?" he asked. "Some kisses? Some compliments? You want to have your way with me without any warm-up?"

"It's the warm-up that's the problem," I muttered, but then I had to squeal, because he had transferred me to the bed, his body now resting lightly on me, his lips sucking at my neck.

"Hey!" I laughed as soon as I'd caught my breath, and then Edward kissed my throat and face until I lost it again.

"Alice did say we'd be using the bed, so I had to make her vision come true," he mumbled eventually. I shook my head; I'd never been able to quite grasp how Alice's gift worked, and probably wouldn't until I had some more folds in my brain.

His cold hands started running along my wool-covered arms, over my torso, my nipples demonstrating precisely how thin my sweater was, his erection pressing hard on my hip. I pressed that hip back into him. "What's that?" I murmured.

"True, I don't _need_ much foreplay, but it's exceedingly pleasant," he said huskily into my neck, making me moan in agreement. _Oh._ We could simply make out, but that would leave us both frustrated. And while his capacity was undoubtedly much greater than mine, in the Big O rankings Team Bella was substantially ahead, so … My fingers worked hurriedly to unbutton his jeans the rest of the way, and with a supreme effort I pushed at his chest, feeling the muscles tense under the soft linen of his shirt.

"You're just going to get me hot and bothered and not be able to do anything about it," I grumbled.

"Sounds familiar."

"Get back into position, Cullen."

Edward slowly sat up and swung his legs back to the floor, feet straddling the pillow that had magically appeared there; somebody felt the rugs in this obscenely expensive hotel weren't thick enough. I clambered off the bed and stood in front of him again, pulling at his shirt. "Take this off?" I asked, and he did, unbuttoning it and letting it fall off. He helped me remove his jeans and boxers, and there he was, the Vitruvian man, all perfect proportions and hard surfaces. So beautiful. I sank down onto my heels and stared at him as he sat on the bed again.

"I don't get to look at you enough," I whispered.

"You might get tired of the view in a couple of hundred years," he said, and I shook my head at his foolishness, leaning forward to kiss his chest, cool skin against my face, then trailing my lips and fingernails downward, a journey quickly interrupted by the tip of his cock against his torso. I kissed him there and he shuddered, and I shook my head again, my hair wrapping around his length for a second and then releasing, and he moaned a "fuck, Bella."

I trembled and looked up. "Hands," I reminded him. He slowly, tentatively, grasped the tops of my shoulders and I lowered my lips to him again. He was cold, but my tongue and mouth and fingers were able to warm him gradually, and my sweater protected me from his thighs. His breath hitched and hurried, his sounds making my heart race.

"My God, Bella, Bella, I could never have imagined this … so perfect on me, your mouth…" he mumbled, his words tumbling out, then suddenly his hands were gone, and I knew he was close. I felt his legs tense and his back arch, and then heard the sound of tearing and a roar that surely tested the solidity of the masonry. "Stop, sweetheart," he finally breathed out, unwilling to dare touch my head.

I released him and put the side of my face on his thigh, cooling the heat in my cheek. His hands finally came back to me, rubbing my back, stroking my hair.

"Bella, you're all right?" he asked softly.

"Completely. You weren't too cold. And you?"

"Oh, I'm completely all right too," he said, a smile in his voice, and I looked up at him. "I had to move my hands, but it all worked out – hmm, the bedding might disagree. Speaking of –" he pulled the duvet over himself as a cushion and pulled me up into his lap. I settled against his chest, and he kissed the top of my head. "I wish I could do something for you…" he said, trailing off.

"Umm, the siblings are still around, aren't they?" I asked, shy again.

"Yes … but, you know, they aren't listening."

"Even Emmett?"

"Well, maybe Emmett," he conceded, with the usual lack of concern he showed in these matters. "Though in truth, they all must have heard me. In fact, any vampire within a 10-mile radius just heard me." He paused for a second. "Do you need a drink of water?"

It hadn't occurred to me that I would. "No. Should I?"

"It seems a common request."

A human request, I supposed. His response made my heart twist. How many times he must have heard people imagining or reenacting in their minds what we had just done - how could he endure it? Though I still couldn't understand how he had resisted for so long something that felt so good to me, that obviously felt good to him, surely overexposure to other people's fantasies must have been a factor.

"Sometimes I feel as if I should apologize for the human race," I said, "for inflicting so many unwanted visuals on you."

"Vampires do it too. I'm just grateful that I can't hear animals as well…." he said dryly.

"My God, don't even joke about that, please," I pleaded. I looked around and spotted the clothes Alice had promised me on a chair in our room's little sitting area. "I guess I should go change," I said. Edward helped me up, and knowing that I'd have a hard time getting anything done while he was still naked, I took my new outfit with me to the bathroom, ignoring the short boots resting under the chair. It was too hot outside to even contemplate boots.

The pants were skinny and black and would work fine with my sandals, while the shirt was loose and gossamer-thin, in a pattern of greens that was manipulated in some way so that it was opaque over my chest, concealing the nude bra Alice had provided, and nearly transparent over my waist and arms. It was sexy, but not so overtly that I felt ridiculous trying to carry it off. I had to admire Rosalie's taste.

I walked out as Edward, already dressed, was calling downstairs for more sheets, and his reaction was somewhat different. "I. Am. Going. To. Kill. Rosalie," he said as he put down the phone, crisply enunciating every word. I looked down at my shirt. Nope, it wasn't indecent.

"Well, _I _like it - and I have to wear it to make Alice's vision come true," I said, echoing his words from before, and he made a noise of frustration and resignation.

"Fine," he sighed. "You do look beautiful." He ran his hand through his hair. "Bella, do you mind taking the subway downtown?"

"No," I answered, puzzled by the look that flitted across his face. "But why don't you want to drive? Aren't we going to Brooklyn?"

"Yes, but driving here is so slow, and –" he continued on with affected pompousness, "the subway's better for the environment."

"It'd be better for the environment if you didn't drive 60 miles over the speed limit, too," I pointed out.

"I never said I wasn't a hypocrite."

* * *

I learned several things at dinner that night: there are many wonderful things a chef can do with crispy pork belly; I don't like expensive Asian beer any more than Rainier, which is to say not much; New Yorkers are willing to pay $8 for a basket of bread and butter – granted, it was delicious bread, and butter decadently mixed with pork fat, but it was still a basket of _bread and butter_; and some people aren't reluctant to give you death glares when they realize that your escort has charmed the hostess into seating you before them at the no-reservations restaurant they've been twiddling their BlackBerry thumbs before for the past hour or so. I ducked my head and looked at my feet as we sidled through the crowd after dinner and headed for another subway station.

"Why is it named the L train?" I asked as we waited on an empty section of the subway platform, Edward in his favorite faux relaxed stance, leaning against a column. The train we'd taken to the restaurant was the 4; how did people figure out where they were going?

"New York City subway lines are named for famous numbers and letters."

"That's pretty good."

"I stole it," he said. A westbound train came in then on the opposite track, pushing around the hot air and making my shirt flutter. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance: I was 3,000 miles from home, with my vampire husband, my vampire in-laws waiting on the other side of the river, and we were doing something so … normal; the man next to me excepted, I was surrounded by normal people – a tired-looking woman with shopping bags and a baby sleeping in a stroller; a gaggle of teenagers flirting with each other, a grizzled man, also tired, in mechanic's overalls. Gooseflesh crawled up my back and for a few seconds I felt as if I was floating. I took a deep breath and tried to find a way back to reality. Oh, yes, mechanics.

"Spill it – you messed with Emmett's tire, didn't you?" I said after the train left, sucking air after it. Edward seemed fascinated by the movement of my shirt around my torso. "Edward?"

"Yes," he said absently.

"Yes, yes?"

He finally looked at my face. "Yes, yes."

"Did you do everyone else's car, too?"

"Only Emmett would be foolhardy enough to tamper with Rosalie's car."

The thought of Rosalie made me forget to ask about Alice and Jasper's vehicles. "Yeah, what's going on with Rosalie?" I said. "She was so friendly when we came back to Forks, but now she's cold again."

He pushed off from the pillar and stepped to me, putting his hands on my hips, kissing me gently for a moment.

"It's not my department, but as far as I can tell, she's a mass of conflicting emotions," he said eventually. "Guilt over Italy, gratitude toward you, resentment that I've unsettled her life, anger that we've ignored her warnings – even some happiness for us. Truly," he answered my skeptical expression. "It's the most emotional turmoil she's experienced since she found Emmett. It's a tiny echo of how I felt junior year when a new student moved into town and crooked her little finger at me …" He gave me his half-smile. "Rosalie might need a few years. Or decades."

"What fun for us," I couldn't help saying.

He nodded, rueful. "She's also glad you decided to wait on your change, and still shocked you came back from the island in the condition in which you left."

"I didn't," I smirked up at him.

"True. I didn't either, thank God."

We got off at the first stop in Brooklyn, as did the woman with the sleeping baby. Edward carried the stroller up the stairs to the street, grunting with false exertion as he set it down on the sidewalk.

The woman thanked him, and told me, "Someday, somebody will do the same for you."

"Um, yeah," I said, uncomfortably.

As she walked away, I whispered to Edward, trying to distract myself from her comment, "Why is she dressed so oddly?" The woman was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, a long heavy skirt, and thick tights; she had a scarf tied around her head.

"She's a Satmar, part of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group, and Williamsburg is their neighborhood. Well, it was theirs first, and now they have to share it with the hipsters."

"Do they share better than the Cullens and the Quileutes?"

"That's not a very high standard, is it?"

The club was on a block of old warehouses, and we got there first, though just barely. Still, that meant that I got to watch the crowd on the sidewalk react to the arrival of the other four Cullens, skin glowing under the streetlights, striding up to Edward and me as we waited in front of a security gate protecting an auto parts store. Edward had caused some buzz, but it was nothing compared with the murmurs that arose when Rosalie appeared, in thigh-high boots and a tiny skirt, her clothing a grand "fuck you" to the aspiring conceptual artists milling about in their plaids and Gang of Four T-shirts and tattoos; she looked ready to star in the most clichéd hip-hop video ever.

"Jeez, Rosalie, it's a good thing you never wore that in Forks – the entire male population would had had aneurysms, and Carlisle would have had to treat them, and -" I babbled before stopping short, not sure of her mood, but she simply shrugged, accepting it as her due. After all, she was one of about a dozen women in the world who could look good in those boots. Maybe I'd just need to spend the next few years complimenting Rosalie at every opportunity. "And thanks for the shirt," I added. "It's amazing."

Edward made a strangled noise next to me. "Yes, Rose, it's exactly what I would have picked out for my wife to wear into a room filled with hormone-addled boys," he complained.

"You know you love it," Rosalie told him.

"That's not the point –"

"Right. The point is that Bella likes it. So just hush."

To my astonishment, he did. I gaped at them both, and Emmett and Jasper laughed. "You tell him, baby," Emmett said, giving Rosalie a squeeze.

Alice, meanwhile, was too busy looking at my feet in disapproval to pay attention to this exchange. She was in boots, too, more modest knee-high ones. "You're going to be sorry in those sandals," she told me, scolding.

"Why?"

"You'll see. Just think of it as a learning experience."

Jasper led us upstairs to the venue, and the doorman let the lethal vampires by without comment, but demanded my ID, which I fished awkwardly out of my pocket. His eyes moved from my picture to me, and I tensed even as Edward ran his hand comfortingly down my back, but Jasper's work was of course flawless, and I was nodded in.

It was an open, bare space, with a bar on one side and the stage at the other, the band's equipment waiting. The floor squelched under my sandals, last night's beer having soaked into the industrial carpet. We followed Jasper to the other side of the room near the left end of the stage and a fire exit - Jasper wanted to be able to leave in a hurry in case the press of humans got to be too much. Cities must be so hard for him, I thought.

Emmett and Rosalie disappeared to the bar for a few minutes, and came back with a soda for me, which Rosalie handed over with an arched eyebrow, and a few plastic cups of prop beer. As we chatted about the band, the Cullens passed the cups around, occasionally spilling the contents discreetly into their distracted neighbors' drinks.

Thinking of the monotony of the clothes around us, I asked, "Were you guys ever, you know, hippies or, um, beatniks?" I couldn't picture them in beads and tie-dye, but perhaps they had needed to dress the part to fit in somewhere.

"We were goths once," Jasper answered, and Alice scowled while everyone else laughed, obviously a story there. "You should tell her about it, Alice."

"Well," Alice took a deep breath, "Carlisle was at a medical conference in London in 1979, and we went there with him. Bauhaus was playing, and the club had a goth contest before the show. So I entered Esme and Jasper and Edward and me." She waggled her finger at Rosalie and Emmett. "Not them, because they're just too… _much _to be convincing goths, even when they're made up." I had to grin, because I could see her point, and the irony was beyond rich. "Our clothes were perfect, _of course_, and Esme has such wonderful hair to play with and you put Edward in eyeliner and black lipstick and a studded collar, and he makes a mighty fine goth."

What an awesome sight that would be. I stared at Edward, who looked as embarrassed as one could without a blush. "Are there photographs?" I asked hopefully.

"No," said Edward firmly. I pouted my lip at him.

"Edward was a very good sport about it," Alice said. "Much better than Jasper." She gave her husband a fond smile.

"So what happened?" I asked, remembering Alice's scowl earlier.

"We came in _second,_" she wailed and stamped a booted foot, as if it had happened yesterday instead of three decades ago. "It had to have been fixed, because the winners were clearly inferior to us. They didn't even have the right shoes, and one had fangs - _honestly_. The audience booed, but we still didn't get the prize," she said mournfully.

"It was a Bauhaus album signed by the lead singer," Jasper said.

"Peter Murphy was terribly handsome back then," Alice said distantly, "in the right light." Jasper shook his head in disgust.

The music started, loud and dense and full of guitars, the lights moved from purple to red to blue, and I leaned back against Edward, swaying, unseen and thus unselfconscious in the darkness. The chill of his skin seeped easily through my thin shirt, and I reached my hands behind me to slip my fingers into his hair and pull him closer to me for as long as I could stand it.

"I love you so much," I whispered, knowing he could hear me under the wall of sound. He kissed my neck in the only answer I needed. I opened my eyes to find our siblings in similar poses; it was beautiful to see them, needing each other so much, so unbreakably connected.

The band eventually announced they were taking a break from their incredibly tight jeans, and there was knowing laughter – some of the guys in the audience were in the skinniest pants imaginable. I needed to go to the restroom and looked around, unable to see it. "Alice?" I asked, and she spun out of Jasper's arms and grabbed my wrist, pulling me from Edward and through the clusters of flirters. Apparently invisible, I got slapped by some guy's belt chain on the way, and poked by a few ironically worn fanny packs; whatever else happened tonight, Edward obviously didn't need to worry about my being hit on.

The women's room was small and lacked a door, and there was a giant puddle of ... something on the floor.

"Oh, that's disgusting," I moaned. Alice's expression spoke volumes. "Alice, did you see this?"

"Why would I need to bother? I've been in places like this before," she said.

The stalls at least had doors, but they were all occupied, one by somebody giggling hysterically. No, somebodies. By now a line of women, all wearing smarter footwear than I, had formed behind me.

"Watch me," Alice mouthed.

She marched to the middle stall and rapped sharply. "If you don't get out right now," she warned, "I'm going to go in and rip your throats out." She sounded utterly believable. Well, she would.

The giggles stopped abruptly, and a couple, flushed and twitchy, quickly exited the stall, looking at Alice uneasily. The other women in line applauded and Alice made a tiny curtsy as I carefully stepped over the puddle.

It was as we were passing under a fan halfway back to the others that it happened. Alice suddenly hissed in the middle of a commentary about tramp stamps and grabbed my hand, and we were moving at just below the speed walking turns into running.

"What do you see?" Jasper asked in a low voice as Edward pulled me to him.

"It's what do I smell," Alice answered. "A colleague."

"Not from Vol -" I asked in alarm, and Alice immediately shook her head.

"Fuck me," Emmett said. "Eight million stories in the naked city, and we're going to have to hear this one." Rosalie looked annoyed, and I felt a flash of irritation – I had brought down a lot of vampires on her and her family this summer, but this one wasn't my fault. She could just as easily blame the doorman.

The Cullens had already shifted positions - Jasper at the arrow point, Alice and Emmett to his right and left, and Edward and Rosalie flanking me - for there was an eerily beautiful man with light brown hair walking toward us, his eyes trained on Jasper. He made few concessions to blending in - his black clothing accentuated his pallor, he glided across the floor with inhuman grace - but he wasn't noticeably supernatural in this setting. As he approached, Edward relaxed next to me and leaned down. "Don't worry, he's just curious – and he's too shrewd to tackle us," he whispered almost inaudibly in my ear.

Stopping in front of Jasper, the man said something too softly and rapidly for me to hear, and Jasper said something also incomprehensible in reply. He had been in his mid-20s perhaps, from an era of long-haired men. From over Alice's shoulder I strained to see his eyes, but I couldn't make out a color. Which, I realized, meant that they were black.

To my surprise, Alice gave the stranger an air kiss, and trilled, "It's so great to see you again, Jeff!" as he and Jasper shook hands. Jeff? I looked up at Edward in confusion, and he shook his head.

"Yeah, it's been too long, Jeff," Jasper drawled loudly, his Texas accent strong. "Alice and I were wondering what you'd gotten up to."

"Chasing down opportunities, as always," Jeff said. He too had a Southern accent, one different from Jasper's – a Jeff like Jefferson Davis? I wondered. "What brings you and your friends to New York?"

"We're hanging out for a few days before classes start," Alice said. "We wanted to hear some music."

There was silence for a few seconds. Given our numbers, and from what Edward said, the Cullens obviously faced no danger from him, but visiting New York would be easier if we could convince Jeff that we weren't horning in on his territory.

"Gone to any good restaurants while you're here?" Jeff finally asked, getting down to business.

"Nah, it's hard to be a vegetarian in this city," Jasper said.

Jeff stared at Jasper for a beat, then his eyes narrowed and he said, "Oh, yeah, I heard that you'd changed your diet. But –" he leaned down to Alice and inhaled conspicuously, "I could swear I smell bacon. Even vegetarians have difficulty resisting bacon."

Somehow, I didn't think he was really smelling bacon - or even crispy pork belly.

"Jeff, I don't think you've met the rest of my family," Jasper was saying. "Rosalie and Emmett, Bella and Edward." Rose and Em exchanged pleasantries with Jeff, but all I could do was stare stupidly at him.

Jeff's eyes snapped to me, then Edward. "I think we've playacted for the crowd sufficiently," he said, his voice low and rapid again, but pitched now so I could hear him. His accent had changed as well, to something I couldn't recognize, but definitely not American. "What are you doing with _her_?" he asked Edward. His voice was casual, and close to insulting, but I heard no menace in it.

Edward's arm tensed around me, but his words were quiet, his face calm, almost friendly. "Bella is my wife," he said. Jeff continued to look at him skeptically. "Bella is my mate."

_My mate._ A shiver ran across my skin. He had never called me that before, and it sounded raw and primal – and sexy. God. What an inappropriate thought for the situation.

Jeff, however, seemed to find it amusing. "Is that so?" he said silkily, looking at me for the first time as if I might be capable of speech, and I nodded. "Where are you from, suliko?" Edward pulled me closer to him – whatever suliko meant, he didn't like it.

Not wanting to give Jeff directions to Charlie's house, I squeaked out, "Phoenix," which seemed to amuse him more. He regarded me speculatively a moment longer.

"Apparently, then, I have no grounds for objection to your being here," he said at last. "The other rules – which you are blatantly violating – are no concern of mine. But I must say that you people are even crazier than I had heard. _Mate,_" he chortled as if it was the funniest thing he'd heard in a few centuries.

Our siblings broke out into fake laughs for the charade, and Jeff declared loudly in his Southern accent that it was great to meet everyone, and he shook hands again with Jasper.

"Fucking Williamsburg," Emmett grumbled as our visitor walked away, and everyone except me erupted in genuine laughs this time. I was unable to tear my eyes away from Jeff; he had made his way to a mousy girl about my age who was standing with her girlfriends closer to the door. Her brown hair was shorter than mine, but it was obvious what he was doing. She looked at him with a familiar dazed expression as he leaned down and murmured to her.

_This _would be my fault.

I pictured going over to the girl and doing something, anything to save her. A second later, two tiny, powerful hands grabbed my wrists, then a pair of larger ones clasped my shoulders, as Edward absorbed Alice's vision.

"Don't even think about it," Alice muttered. "Besides, he's just playing with us. She's going to survive the night. There'd be too much attention in the press if an N.Y.U. coed disappeared."

"Alice's right, Bella," Edward added quietly. "He's too old and controlled to be so blatant. The only thing he wants to kill here is time. His plan was always to find someone in a neighborhood further east – an illegal immigrant, somebody whose death nobody will notice." His voice was resigned.

Jeff turned away from the dazzled girl and winked at me before he walked toward the exit. I watched him vanish, my stomach roiling. All the other crimes I could understand, and accept, but this... I wished I just didn't have to know. Everyone else had had to come to terms with this, and I would have to as well.

"Is his name really _Jeff?_" I asked, turning back toward my family. "That seems so … mundane."

"He said his real name was Garsevan," Jasper said, looking to Edward for confirmation.

"Yes, he's a Georgian," Edward said, and the others nodded.

"But his real accent …" I said, confused.

"The other Georgia," Edward clarified gently, even as Rosalie laughed at me. "His Southern accent is his little joke. By the way," he added pointedly, "he liked your shirt, very much."

"Oh. But how did you know what he was thinking?"

"Edward speaks Georgian," Alice said.

"You do?"

"It is said to be one of the hardest languages to learn, and I had plenty of time," Edward said. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, "I'm hoping to have a lot less time now…"

"You're just trying to distract me."

"And I think it's working, _my mate_."

Damn, I couldn't hide anything like that from him.

The band started up again, but Edward and I couldn't quite make it through the second set. As we walked down the stairs to the street, I glanced at the doorman who had let in so many killers. Perhaps he should think of another line of work.

* * *

Edward's arm was draped over my hip when I woke in a cocoon of heat the next morning. As I opened my eyes, he lifted my hair and nuzzled my neck from behind, and I pushed back against him automatically.

"Wow, you're really hot," I mumbled.

"Thank you."

"No, Mr. Conceited, your skin is blazing," I retorted, my sense of humor not yet quite awake.

He didn't seem to mind. "I think we've found a winner in the electric blanket competition," he said. "You seemed to sleep well. Did you?" he asked, his voice saying something much more sensual than his words. My body reacted immediately. _Oh, yes, I'm awake now._ I turned to smile shyly at him.

"Umm-hmmm. I'll be right back," I said, and slipped out of bed.

When I returned, he started to pull the blankets over us securely, but I stopped him. "I'm rather hot myself –"

"You are."

I rolled my eyes at him. " – So maybe we don't need these for the moment."

"I think I can work with that," he said, his voice now as sultry as his skin. "Everyone's gone out, by the way." _Oh, good_. I had forgotten about that little wrinkle. "That means I can make you cry out as loudly as you did me yesterday," he murmured. _Oh, God._

"And we can do this..." he said, pulling me on top of him, allowing the blankets to slide down his legs, and I straddled his waist, letting my eyes rake over his body, feeling his erection twitch against my back. Mmmmm, warm wake-up sex indeed.

We took turns, my hands running down his arms and back up into his hair, his fingers trailing down my back and around my bottom before rising to my breasts, his thumbs pressing into my nipples and making my breath falter. I leaned over and flicked my tongue lightly on his own nipples, and he shuddered.

"You're so wet on my skin," he said, his whisper needy and dark, and I inhaled sharply and sat up so I could reach around to grab his cock. He moaned, and I lifted my hips up and back, and then down, little by little, giving myself the time needed to open to him. He was so warm inside me, and my body clenched at the sensation.

I opened my eyes to see him gazing at me, his hands lying quietly alongside him, not clawed in the sheets. I lifted my hips, so only his tip remained in me, and stopped. "Can you touch me?" I asked softly, then lowered myself again till he filled me. He considered for a moment, always assessing, then moved a hand to my left hip and brushed the thumb of his other hand against my clit, making me jolt.

"Try to hold still for me, love," he said, his voice tense. "Please." He held me a bit more firmly, and started moving his thumb again. My flesh went into overdrive, and I cried out uncontrollably, shaking with the effort to restrain my hips. Did it feel like that for him? I wondered suddenly. Was it this much of a struggle for him all the time? Didn't he long to just let go?

His thumb worked in circles, and after a few revolutions, I couldn't hold back anymore, my orgasm forcing me to push down and around him. He called my name, and now his hands were grasping both my hips … and moving me, with a speed I'd never have managed on my own. It was as if I was weightless. The wave of sensation overtook me again, or perhaps it never stopped, and I was moaning as loudly as he had promised. _The speed…_ the speed now was incredible … oh, it wasn't human, it was on the verge of too much. I had to slow him so he would continue to trust me to guide him.

"Easy, baby," I managed to whisper, and his hands loosened their grip, and I slumped forward a bit, resting my weight on his torso, moving over him until the wave receded. "Now, come now," I urged him, ready to set him free, and he held me still again to thrust up into his release, his own cry echoing in the room.

We stared at each other for a few moments, breathing hard, his expression wary. I put a finger to his lips before he could ask.

"I'm fantastic, fabulous, even fine," I said. "I am." I nuzzled his neck and breathed in his incredible scent for a few minutes before I just had to ask.

"Was that … normal?"

"I don't know," he said, surprising me; he was usually so confident. "I don't have anything to compare us to, you realize, despite decades of involuntary eavesdropping. But it seemed to work, yes?" he asked.

"Oh, it worked, all right."

"Then it's normal for us. We set the standard, after all."

"Was it normal for humans?"

"No," he said, and his face lightened and he gave me a lazy grin. "You're not a normal human, after all. I've always said so."

We shifted, and cleaned up, and switched off the blankets, our bodies still so warm, and curled up under the sheets for a bit before breakfast.

"Speaking of normal..." I started, and I could see from his wary expression that he knew what I was going to say. "What's normal for vampires?"

"It's a range," he said carefully. Oh, that bad.

"And I run the gamut from A to B," I said with dissatisfaction, turning away from his intense gaze.

He sighed unhappily. "No, Bella, please ... it's more the gamut from oh, D to G." He took my chin and forced me to look at him. "It's far beyond anything I ever expected. It's everything I could have asked for, and more than I could have known to ask for. Tell me you know that."

"Okay," I said reluctantly, though I wasn't convinced. "Why D to G?"

"After you change, after you get a handle on your thirst, intimacy will be a new experience for you, and at both ends of the spectrum. Things that are too much for you now" – he made as if to slap my ass with his palm, and I rolled away from him with a squeal – "will be intensely pleasurable, and touches that are barely noticeable now will be as well." He delicately ran a fingertip down the inside of my forearm, so lightly that I knew he was doing it only because I was watching.

"So after… everything will be more intense?" I asked, still trying to grasp this. "Than now?"

"Yes. And I'm the luckiest man in existence, because I get to do it all twice, with you."

"More than twice, I hope."

"Oh, yes, many, many more times than twice," he said, amused.

That didn't sound that bad, and I snuggled into his arms, somewhat appeased.

I ordered breakfast, and we showered off the stickiness of the previous night before it arrived. As I ate, Edward typed on his laptop and I looked through the front section of the newspaper, reading about the havoc along the East Coast caused by storms spawned by the latest hurricane, explaining the dark skies I could see out our windows.

"So where _is_ everyone?" I finally remembered to ask.

"Surfing."

"Surfing?" I looked out the window again in confusion.

"To the east, on the end of Long Island, is a beach that we visit when we can, and the storms will mean the swells are impressive. They'll be there all day, perhaps all night if the weather holds."

He sounded as if he loved surfing, I thought guiltily. "I'm sorry you can't –"

"Bella, we'll have plenty of opportunities to surf later," he said nonchalantly, and I had to shake my head at the possibility that I would be a surfer one day, even as a vampire. "Here, make yourself useful," he said, and a folded-up page of The Times landed squarely on the table in front of me. "Do you want to take a look at the theater listings and see if there's something you'd like to see tonight?" he asked.

"_South Pacific_?" I said tentatively after scanning the ads for a while.

"A good choice."

I remembered now that it was on his iPod. "Crap, you've seen it already, haven't you?"

"Yes, but that's no problem," he answered. "The production will be different. That's an advantage plays have over movies."

"Can we get tickets?"

"It's a weeknight, there's a recession, and I don't really care about the price, so yes."

It was a short walk to the Met, short enough so that the occasional fat drops of rain that fell didn't get us wet. After Forks, it was nothing. Edward knew exactly where he wanted to go, and he led me through the confused throngs in the entrance hall, calculating the openings in the crowd like a physicist, and upstairs to the European galleries. We stopped in a gallery of Italian Quattrocento paintings, at a Lippi portrait of a stern-looking young woman in a red robe.

But that wasn't what Edward wanted to show me. He nodded toward a small, jewellike painting next to the Lippi, a group of mounted hunters in a perfectly proportioned landscape.

"This is one," he said without elaboration. I read the sign next to the painting.

_Attributed to Master of the Este Diptych_

_Italian, active 1420-1470_

_Hunting Party_

_Tempera on wood_

_The painter of this luminous work has recently been identified as the creator of the Este Diptych in the Accademia Albertina in Turin, a Madonna with donors that has been dated to 1431. If the identification is correct, this painting represents a great advance in the artist's use of perspective and color and his handling of both human and animal forms. Scholars see some similarities in the background to other paintings set near Mantua; perhaps the members of the hunting party will one day be identified with specific members of the powerful Gonzaga family. _

_Purchase, 1992_

"Somebody needed some money," Edward said, pointing at the last line.

"The … Italians?"

"No, they never need money. A perpetually indigent friend in France," he said vaguely. "In any case, the human who figured out the Este connection is quite clever."

"What do you mean?" We spoke in whispers, though this room, in contrast to the chaos downstairs, was empty save for us.

"The Este is pre-change, this is post. So Professor di Stefano had to notice some very subtle parallels in Ricciardo's work."

"You know him?"

"I know of him, but I've never met him. His paintings are quite desirable ... among a certain group of collectors. What do you think?" he asked the question he so often posed on this trip as he stared at the painting, seemingly entranced.

"I don't get it."

"Truly?" He turned to me, surprised.

"It's beautiful, of course," I said, looking at the intricately detailed clothes and tack of the hunters, their mobile faces, the subtle sheens of the horses' coats, the perfectly preserved blue of the sky. Ricciardo had figured out how to make his paints endure. "It's cold. I like this better," I added, gesturing to the Lippi.

Edward looked at the portrait skeptically. "_That's_ cold," he said.

The young woman in the faded red robe was expressionless, and the young man looking into her room from a window was as well. Their gazes didn't meet.

"No, there is all sort of emotion there, underneath," I said. "There is a story that we don't know. Why is she holding her hands over her stomach? Why isn't she looking at her husband? Why are they separated?"

"One theory is that she died in childbirth," he said. "Or it's ineptitude. Ricciardo, however, is perfect."

"Technically, perhaps. I wouldn't know. But I don't care about the Gonzagas."

"Someday you will."

Afterward, we went downstairs to look at the recently refurbished Greek and Roman galleries, which Edward hadn't seen yet. He warned me that the Met didn't have the best collection of ancient art – "The British and French have been much better looters, you'll find," he said – but I was still a bit disappointed with what was on view. No Adonises here, just an Endymion who didn't live up to his reputation as the most beautiful of men. There was, however, a young Roman Hercules that was awfully reminiscent of Emmett. I broke out into a goofy grin when I saw it.

At one point, I was looking at a bronze of a naked spear-thrower, displayed on such a high base that at my height I couldn't avoid staring at his flaccid penis.

"Comparing and contrasting?" Edward asked next to me.

"How could I? I've never seen you in that condition." I said, only half-jokingly.

"That does seem to be a problem around you." He discreetly pressed himself to me to demonstrate and brushed his lips along the shell of my ear.

"It's too crowded here to do what I'd like to do to you right now," he murmured, "but one day we'll go to ... hmmm, the Doria Pamphilj - beautiful paintings, beautiful palazzo, lots of deserted corners ... and a Caravaggio with a scantily clad angel that will confirm your suspicions about my sexual orientation … and I'll make you come in front of a naked goddess or a randy pope ..."

He wrapped his arms around my waist as my legs threatened to collapse in the middle of a sudden wave of little girls wearing light blue school dresses and carrying sketchpads.

"Edward, you just can't say things like that, I can't stay vertical when you do that …." I muttered.

"But I like it when you're not vertical, though vertical against a wall is very appealing, too, if I recall correctly."

"I'm pretty sure you have perfect recall."

On the way out we passed signs for an exhibition of Vermeers from the Rijksmuseum. I liked Vermeer; who didn't, after all? I looked inquiringly at Edward and he sighed.

"Yes, we should go see the silly Vermeers," he said, sounding as if I'd asked him to go to a showing of Thomas Kinkade paintings.

"Silly?" I asked incredulously. These damned vampires were awfully picky about their art.

"They're probably mostly bad fakes anyway," he grumbled.

No, they were beautiful, and I told him so.

* * *

_A/N: Art links on my profile, though not for the Ricciardo._

_Thanks for reading and especially reviewing! Otherwise I don't know if I'm writing nonsense._

_Update, 4/10: I swear I didn't know that Peter Murphy was going to be in the "Eclipse" movie when I wrote this. I guess I'm just not very original._


	6. Chapter 6: NYP

_Disclaimer: I don't own Twilight or its characters, natch._

* * *

Chapter 6: NYP

The auction house was on the third floor of an old warehouse on 16th Street near the Hudson. The space was cavernous, with dark wood floors and stark white walls interrupted by paintings, and a line of windows looking out on the river. Edward and I were greeted unctuously by a floppy-haired young Englishman wearing a navy pinstriped wool suit that seemed to flow over him like silk. He still seemed slightly awkward next to my husband, dressed down in black jeans and a blazer.

"Simon," Edward said in response, his greeting a bit reserved in comparison. Simon apparently wasn't behaving well mentally, though I didn't know if it was about me or about Edward -- I couldn't tell if he was gay, or just British. Edward made the introductions so curtly that I couldn't decipher much of Simon's name other than that it was complicated, then he leaned over to me and said, "I need to do some business with Simon for Esme, but it should take only a few minutes. Why don't you look around and," he looked at me with a wicked gleam in his eyes, "see if there's anything you like?"

"Uh, sure," I muttered, feeling out of my depth, but dutifully walking into the exhibition space as Edward and Simon Double-Barreled disappeared down a hallway. I wasn't alone: a young woman wearing all black was with an expensively dressed older blonde with a Southern accent who was gesturing at a painting that reminded me of kindergarten spin art, but not in a bad way; I'd always liked spin art. Another black-clad young woman was escorting another expensively dressed older blonde who talked loudly in Spanish and seemed not to be looking at anything. I wondered if the two clients used the same hair stylist.

I grabbed an auction catalogue from an undulating brushed-steel table, and opened it. Surely Edward was joking, I thought, as I saw the estimate prices. I mean, I knew vaguely that Impressionist paintings sold for multiple millions at auction, but I hadn't heard of any of these artists, whose works apparently went for hundreds of thousands. Jake would roll on the floor with laughter if he saw these prices.

As I paused in front of a large white canvas with a gray shadow on it, I got distracted by what I could see out the window. It was a strip of garden, of asters and grasses, and I tried to figure out how it ended up three stories in the air. Just then, I could sense Edward's presence behind me; he had crept up noiselessly as usual. I turned around to look at him, feeling that I had missed him even in the 10 minutes he'd been with Simon.

"What do you think of it?" Edward asked, nodding toward the white canvas. I looked it up in the catalog. Gerhard Richter, 1968.

"It's kind of boring," I confessed.

Edward laughed loudly, and the Spanish woman, apparently a hypocrite about noise, glared at us.

"That's what we thought, too," Edward said. He pointed at the provenance listing. Pacific Northwest Trust was the seller. Estimate $150,000 - $210,000.

"Really?" I asked.

"Really," he echoed me. "We liked it in '68, though."

"What happened to eternal love? Doesn't it count for art, too?"

He leaned down to whisper in my ear. "Oh, I have eternal love for one piece of art, Mrs. Cullen." His hands went to my waist to pull me closer, and his lips started to nibble on my neck. "I'm ready to give you a lesson in art appreciation anytime you'd like. "

Maybe this place had private viewing rooms. With attached saunas…

A dramatic bit of throat-clearing reminded us where we were. Edward froze, then lifted his head to look apologetically at the blond helmet-head, and said, "Sorry." I knew it was utterly insincere, but she, predictably, melted. He turned back to the rejected painting.

"What is it about you and art galleries?" I whispered to him as we assumed the proper nontouching posture for looking at paintings.

"I think the question is, what is it about _you_ and art galleries," he replied. "Well, the Richter. It was a good purchase. We'll make a tidy profit even with the fees, which I was negotiating with Simon – "

"You were negotiating?"

"It's one of my strengths."

"As I well know. But is it _fair_?" I asked, looking at him askance.

"Everybody does it. It would look odd if I didn't negotiate, and I'm not taking advantage of anyone who doesn't expect it. So get used to it. We are immoral, after all." He paused. "Did you see anything here you wanted?"

"I like the spin art," I answered flippantly.

Edward knew exactly what I meant, and chuckled.

"Darling, it _is_ spin art," he drawled, in perfect imitation of Simon's plummy accent.

I looked at him in awe. I knew he'd fooled Jacob with his imitation of Carlisle, but I'd never heard him do that before. "Wow, you're really talented," I blurted.

"Oh, my mouth has many talents." He lifted an eyebrow at me.

I blushed and changed the subject. "You mean, spin art as in he made it with one of those machines kids use?"

"Yes."

"My God." I wasn't cut out to be a modern art critic, that was certain.

"So," he went on. "Damien Hirst. You certainly picked out the highlight of the auction. We could buy it --"

"No!" I protested. "We're not buying a $200,000 kindergarten painting. Esme will freak! And then I won't say I like anything again, because I'll be too afraid you'd buy it."

"Don't worry," he said, grinning. "I can't imagine it's a good investment anyway. Someday collectors will look at those carcasses in formaldehyde and wonder why they would ever have bought them."

He'd lost me with that. "If our art dealing is done," I said, "I'd like to see what's out the window. And get a real kiss."

At that, he hustled me out of the auction house. We paused just in front, where the façade was covered in the scaffolding that seemed ubiquitous in New York – even one side of our chi-chi hotel had it. For appearance sake, Edward lifted me up so I was sitting on one of the scaffold's bars before standing between my legs and kissing my lips and various other parts of me soundly. It was quite a show, I guessed, because when we pulled away from each other I finally noticed that we were getting a round of applause from a group of boisterous teenagers in navy polo shirts and khakis, freed from school and on their way to a set of stairs at the end of the street. I blushed again, and Edward smiled to see it.

Soon we had walked up the same set of stairs to the oddly high garden. I was enchanted – it was a brand-new park, planted on what used to be an elevated train track. The asters were growing among the railroad ties in some places, and the catcalling high-schoolers were now rough-housing on wooden chaises with casters that allowed them to roll along the rails. I could see barges on the Hudson, just across the highway beneath us.

"What was this?" I asked.

"Freight trains used to run from the docks into the warehouses here. And I mean literally into the warehouses. Look –" he pointed at an old brick factory building in front of us that straddled the tracks. "But the traffic eventually died off, and the tracks were abandoned for decades, so some of the neighbors lobbied to have it turned into a park. There's a similar park in Paris, which you'll see someday."

Paris? I could live with that. Or maybe "live" wasn't the right word. The terminology was hard to figure out.

We walked under the factory looking at the art installations there. On the other side, we could see a modern aqua and silver glass hotel that also spanned the park. Its floor to ceiling windows were mostly cloaked in curtains, but a few were open, for the view, I supposed. Some of the people around us had stopped and were staring up and I followed their gazes: a few stories above us, I could see a couple embracing, the man shirtless. Oh, more than shirtless.

"Oops," I gasped, looking away hastily, only to meet Edward's amused eyes.

"Welcome to my mind," he said ruefully. He glanced up at the hotel window. "Does that bother you?"

It took me a few seconds to sort out my feelings. Arousal? Embarrassment? Such a frequent combination for me. "I suppose it's beautiful in a way, but … it should be private," I said finally. "What is that place, the Exhibitionist Arms?"

"And legs, and torsos…."

I laughed, but suddenly felt somewhat hypocritical. "We were rather exhibitionist ourselves, back on the scaffolding," I said.

"Did _that_ bother you?"

"No, I didn't know we had an audience until we stopped because, well, you have that effect on me…" I smiled shyly at him. I continued on, more pensively, "The thought of being watched doesn't turn me on, though --"

"That's fortunate, because the thought of someone else watching you doesn't turn me on _at all_," he nearly growled.

"Oh, you want to keep the monopoly on being my Peeping Tom, I see."

"I want to be your only obsessed stalker, too." He laughed at my astonishment. "You don't have the monopoly on making fun of me."

As the park came to an end a few blocks north, I saw a somewhat lumpy, translucent white structure with gleams of purple and blue at the bottom to the west, very close to the river. "That's the new Gehry building," Edward said happily. "I haven't been here in a couple of years, so I haven't seen it yet." I realized that Edward was thrilled at experiencing something new, _enjoying _life, even after a century of it, and how unusual that would be for a human. I wondered if I'd be like that. I hoped.

"What do you think of it?" he asked, as always trying to get me to say my thoughts out loud.

"I like it. It's sort of like an iceberg on the Hudson."

"It's an apt description, though I wonder if we'll like it in 20 years. Sometimes the best buildings are the ones you hate at first…."

"Sounds familiar," I said significantly.

"And the best wives, too, evidently." He grinned at me. "Come on, let's go back down to the sidewalk and get you lunch, and then do something properly touristy."

I'd heard lots of Spanish in Phoenix, of course, but I'd never been somewhere with such an abundance of languages. People passed us talking in Russian, in Chinese, in Korean, in Polish, in Hebrew, in Italian. Edward laughed once when a French couple walked by, a gangly young man talking animatedly to his pouty-lipped companion.

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"He is telling her a joke, and she doesn't think it's that good."

"What is it?"

"To understand it, you have to know that there's a drink in France called a citron pressé, 'squeezed lemon,' which is a glass of lemon juice, a carafe of water and sugar. You mix it yourself at the table in cafes." My mouth involuntarily puckered at the thought.

"But pressé also means 'in a hurry.'" He paused. "Are you ready for the big joke?"

I nodded.

"Mama Lemon and Papa Lemon are going to the beach, but Baby Lemon keeps falling behind. So Papa Lemon smashes Baby Lemon and says, "Citron pressé.'"

We were silent for a few seconds.

"But she decided to laugh anyway," he finally said.

"It must be love." I looked at him a moment. "You never tell jokes. Not joke jokes, with a punch line."

"You mean, aside from when I first asked you to marry me?" I gave him a dirty look. "Telling jokes wasn't a much admired skill when I was growing up, and I never learned. So you have to teach me how. And promise to always laugh."

"I will." I grinned at him. "Because it is love."

He started grilling me on paintings as we made our way to the restaurant, but he paused when I got distracted as we walked past a decrepit cemetery in the middle of a block of brownstones. Blank brick walls surrounded it on three sides. There was a plaque on a wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk that explained it was a Jewish burial ground that had been in existence for centuries, far outliving the families that remembered burying their relatives there.

It was a bleak sight. Someday, I could visit my own empty gravesite. Maybe there would be an "In Memoriam" marker for me next to where Charlie would be eventually buried. And decades into the future, there would be no family members to keep it up: Charlie's line would end with me.

"Do you have a grave, somewhere?" I asked Edward.

"Yes," he said, somewhat uncomfortably, probably guessing where my thoughts had gone. "I bought a plot in Chicago and put a stone there in 1925, a few years after I claimed my inheritance, in case there were long-lost relatives who did a little investigating. So do Rosalie and Alice, since they had family who erected stones to commemorate their vanished children. But the rest of us don't."

The unmarked restaurant was rustic and Italian this time, and as usual, Edward charmed the hostess into seating us, even though the kitchen was about to close. I was going to get a new complex about going out to eat.

He continued the art inquisition for a while, still nonplussed that I hadn't fallen into a swoon over Ricciardo, but when he asked about the Hirst, I couldn't help but sigh.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

I chewed on my perciatelli with rabbit ragu a moment. "I'm feeling a bit as if I'm doing my final in art history," I finally admitted to him. What's more, though I would never tell him so, I felt that he must get weary of my unschooled opinions. "And in truth, will I even recall any of these things I'm seeing?"

"But that's it, I can help you with that," he said, quiet but strong. He moved so that our legs were entwined under the table, and I looked at him with a question. "You may not remember what you felt now, after, but I will. I can catalog your every reaction for you – what you thought about a painting or a movie or a play, how you reacted to foie gras when you tasted it the first time, how it felt to be tired, how your hair curled when you were somewhere humid. How wide your eyes were when New York first came into view. How adorably you yawned. The sounds you made when you slept. How your body would twitch when you dreamed." I was blushing, knowing that there were some _interesting _ways my body moved when I had some _interesting_ dreams.

"How beautiful you looked when you blushed." He reached over to brush his thumb across my cheek. He continued in an even lower voice. "How your skin felt when I touched you. How relaxed you were after we made love. How your face looked when I kissed you. How you would smile when you saw me waiting for you after gym. How warm and soft you felt when you woke up next to me in the morning. It's as if I have a photo album in my mind. When I was … away, I would flip through it constantly, every ineradicable image I have of you. If they had been real photographs, they would have fallen apart from being handled so much."

His intensity was almost palpable, weighing me down, but also comforting in its weight, a shared weight, now. He shook his head, as if trying to shake off those agonizing memories that he could never make disappear. I couldn't imagine how they could disappear for me, even if I forgot my human family and every bit of my childhood after my change.

"Will I really forget everything?" I asked.

"It's not that you'll forget right away, if my experience is any guide," he answered. "But your old memories will be murky compared with your new ones. It's harder to grasp them; they'll seem to slip away. And they _will_ eventually fade away."

"I don't care if I can't remember seeing Vermeer. But I don't want to lose my memories of being with you like this, right now," I whispered. "I want to be able to remember all my moments with you, the good ones and … the bad ones. I want to remember how you looked when you took me to the meadow the first time. How whole I felt when I saw you again in Volterra, when my heart healed. How torn you looked when I first asked you to make love to me. How unbearably magnificent your face was when you were waiting for me at the end of the aisle at our wedding."

"I will help you remember," he whispered back. "I promise you."

* * *

To be "properly touristy," we took the subway to the Battery so I could see the Statue of Liberty. As we stepped to ground level, I looked in some dismay at the crowds of sweaty, tired people who had been waiting for hours for boats to the statue, but Edward led me the opposite direction, to the Staten Island ferry.

"I'm sorry, even I can't make a trip to Liberty Island bearable. I could hire a boat, but the Parks Service wouldn't let us land," he said as we entered the ferry terminal. We waited a few minutes, staring out the windows over New York Harbor, until the gates opened and we were allowed onto the giant orange ferry. There was no fare.

"Cheap date, huh?" I said, as we walked upstairs to one of the decks. We found spots on the right side of the boat, and the view was pretty decent, both of the statue and of Ellis Island. The water was choppy because of the storms, and the wind was strong on my face, a pleasant respite from the humidity of the rain that never resolved into a downpour. Gulls wheeled around us.

"Did your family come through there?" I asked, pointing to the immigration buildings.

"My parents were born here, and that takes us out of the chronology of Ellis Island. What about yours?"

"I don't know. I never thought to ask."

"I know that some of my mother's people came from Ireland. A member of the United Irishmen who was part of a failed insurrection to overthrow British rule escaped to America in 1803. He became a lawyer and lived a quite boring, respectable life afterward."

"Really?"

"Really. Where do you think the hair comes from?"

"And the eyes," I added quietly.

"And the eyes that were. And my poet's heart," he said theatrically.

"How true, Mr. Yeats."

Edward put his hand to his heart and declaimed:

_Warmly I felt her bosom thrill,  
I pressed it closer, closer still,  
Though gently bid not;  
Till - oh! the world hath seldom heard  
Of lovers, who so nearly erred,  
And yet, who did not. _

I stared at him a minute. "That's … mean. And I don't think it's Yeats."

"No, it's another Irishman, Thomas Moore. You didn't think it was fitting for us?" he teased, and I shoved at him half-heartedly, almost wishing Rosalie was here to smack him in the back of the head.

He just smiled and said, "Here's some Yeats for you: _And now we stare astonished at the sea/And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us."_

A seagull screamed on cue, surprisingly close, making me jump.

"Well, I certainly look more like a Cullen than Carlisle does," Edward went on. "Even he doesn't know how he ended up with an Irish surname."

The subway from the ferry was slow and once it had stopped at Wall Street to pick up the investment bankers and traders, crowded. Edward gave up his seat to a surprised woman in a red suit, then stood in front of me, barely bothering to pretend to need to hold the bar to keep his balance, his posture a silent warning to the other passengers to avoid crowding me. The walls of our car were covered with public service posters showing a former smoker with amputated fingers. They were uncomfortably reminiscent of vampire battle wounds.

At the Brooklyn Bridge station, we had to wait as a short man in a suit and an entourage of aides and bodyguards got on the car next to us. The mayor, Edward told me, and my seatmates quietly muttered curses at the delay. New Yorkers couldn't care less if one of the richest guys in the country shared their train with them – perhaps, come to think of it, two.

In fact, Edward could probably announce what he was, and half the people in the car would shrug and go back to reading their paperbacks, while the other half would be too immersed in whatever was on their iPods to have heard what he said.

We got back to the hotel with barely enough time for me to shower and us to change for the theater. Edward slipped into a dark gray suit, and I put on one of my new sundresses and sandals with a bit of a heel. "My handsome i-banker," I sighed dramatically when I saw Edward in full regalia, but he didn't laugh. He was tense, and I didn't know why.

"There's no good train to Lincoln Center from here, and the walk is too far for us to make the curtain, so we'll have to take a taxicab," he said in the elevator down.

I shrugged. "That's okay," I said. There were always plenty of cabs loitering in front of our hotel, so it shouldn't be a problem getting one.

He set his jaw, and didn't answer.

As I expected, a cab pulled up immediately to the hotel entrance when the doorman signaled. Edward glared at it.

"Look, here's one," I said, confused by his expression. "We'll get there in plenty of time."

Cutting off the doorman, Edward helped me into the back seat of the cab, and as he went around to the other side to get in, unheeding of the traffic whizzing beside him, I told the driver our destination.

"Put your seatbelt on," Edward hissed at me as we took off down the avenue with a jerk, staring at me fiercely until I complied. He didn't do the same, of course; instead, he gripped the opening in the partition between the back seat and the front so hard that that I could hear metal protest. The driver, a bearded young man with a black turban hiding his hair, turned around to look at Edward in alarm. I could see a Bluetooth in his ear.

"Look at the road," Edward said in a tone that brooked no opposition, and the driver whipped his head back around obediently. "And take out that headset. You can't talk and drive." The Bluetooth disappeared.

"I'm sorry, I detest being driven by ... someone else," Edward said, turning to me, his face softening slightly. I understood that another member of his family could take the wheel without problem, but not a faulty human. I now also understood part of his fondness for the safety of the subway.

"You've ridden with me, though," I pointed out.

"I could take the steering wheel at any time. But not in a cab," he said between his teeth. He spent the rest of the ride staring fixedly through the opening and out the windshield, one hand on my thigh, the other clenched on the partition so he could propel himself into the front seat. I felt sorry for the terrorized driver, who seemed perfectly competent. He was certainly a better driver than me.

Thankfully, the traffic wasn't horrible, and the drive was short. When we pulled up in front of Lincoln Center, Edward gave the cabbie an extravagant tip to make up for his rudeness. Our theater was in the back of the complex, so we walked, Edward's arm around my waist, among the hulking buildings along the plaza, skirting a large fountain, passing the hall where the Philharmonic played and the Metropolitan Opera House.

"You've been there, of course?" I nodded toward the opera house, which bore a large banner from one of its arches announcing that "Tosca" would open the new season.

"Yes, but I miss the old opera house on 39th Street. It was quite elegant."

"Do you and Emmett go together?"

"Emmett? Why?"

"I hear him singing an opera song a lot – you know, da-da-DAH, da-da-DAH, da-da-DAH, da-da-DAH-AH…"

"_Libiamo, libiamo, ne'lieti calice/che la belleza infiora,'' _Edward sang out, his voice higher than I'd ever heard it, and loudly enough that a tall, balding man in a suit just in front of us spun around to stare at him. "Sorry," Edward said in the same falsely sincere tone he'd used to apologize in the auction house.

"Not at all," the man answered in German-accented English. "Are you a professional?"

"Naw, I just know that one line, to impress the girls," Edward said boorishly and with a …Jersey accent?, gesturing at me with his thumb. It was so unlike him, and I wondered who the adolescent douche he was imitating so perfectly was. "I don't even know what opera it's from. I don't like opera, to tell the truth. Do you?"

I could see the man's expression change from admiration to disdain as Edward spoke. "'La Traviata,'" the man said in dismissal. "You should see it one day."

"Thanks," Edward said airily. "I'll do that."

The man walked off stiffly toward the opera house, and Edward muttered, "_Again_." I snickered, knowing that he no doubt had the libretto memorized.

"What's up with him?"

"He's an opera director who's never done 'Traviata' but then suddenly found the idea appealing. He was imagining turning the drinking scene in the first act into an orgy."

"Starring you," I said, my mood souring abruptly. Edward shrugged. "So what's the deal with Emmett and 'Traviata'?''

"It's a joke, of course. The Brindisi is a drinking song, and 'libiamo' means 'let's drink.' You can see how that would appeal to Emmett."

"Huh, that's relatively subtle for him," I said.

"The heroine coughs up blood at the end. That's not all that subtle."

"Yeah, you're right ... So, what's _your_ favorite opera?"

"I like 'Tosca' a lot, though I have my doubts now about this production. But I have a special fondness for 'Turandot,' because I saw the American premiere – at the old opera house – in 1926. An odd fondness."

"Why?" Opera was one of the many things I knew next to nothing about.

"It's a rather bloodthirsty opera, shockingly so at the time. I Ieft the next year for … you know. You'll see one day…." He considered a second. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you'll hate opera."

"Maybe," I agreed. Surely even eternal mates -- barring Fanny and Edmund -- didn't always have the same tastes, and Edward could always go to the opera with Carlisle for a boys' night out. "But we'll find out together, won't we?" He squeezed my waist in assent.

Edward didn't exactly stand out in his suit – well, no more than he did wearing a T-shirt and jeans – but he was better dressed than any man in the theater. I looked at the audience members in their casual clothing, and wondered if Edward was remembering glittering crowds in long dresses and dinner jackets at forgotten Broadway opening nights. This was so prosaic by contrast.

But I didn't have time to ask, because we barely got to our seats before the curtain rose. I didn't know much more about Broadway musicals than I did the opera, but I actually recognized some of the songs. The actor playing Emile sang "Some Enchanted Evening," about Nellie, a song that is so over the top romantic that it's almost camp, but with such feeling that I wouldn't have dreamed of laughing. _Fools give you reasons, wise men never try. _

"Was it much different this time?" I asked as we left the theater.

"Quite. The racism is cruder, more blatant than in 1949," he said. I had been surprised by Nellie's revulsion at Emile's dark-skinned children, her use of epithets. It was as harsh as hearing Jake snarl out a "leech" at Edward, or Edward's cutting "mongrel."

"Do you think Nellie would have approved of a mixed-race couple like us?" I asked with a smile.

"I'm pale, you're pale… we're perfect together."

A band was playing in the plaza now, and dancers were swaying to something pre-rock around the fountain. I prepared myself mentally.

His left hand in my right. His right hand on my waist. He turned me gracefully, his flowing movements putting the other dancers to shame. He didn't sing "Some Enchanted Evening" in my ear, but the song of Emile's children.

_Dites-moi/Pourquoi/La vie est bell-a,_

He exaggerated the final syllable.

_Dites-moi/Pourquoi/La vie est gai,_

_Dites-moi/Pourquoi/Chère mad'moisell-uh,_

_Est-ce que/Parce que/ Vous m'aimez?_

His song ended when the band's did.

"Do you mind walking back to the hotel through Central Park? I don't think I can endure two taxicab rides in one day," he asked me as we turned away from the dancers. I had opted for dinner in our room, and Edward had ordered it during intermission.

"Is that safe?" I asked reflexively.

"_Bella_."

"Okay, I know, but it has a reputation…"

"In fact, it's fairly safe even without a supernatural escort nowadays."

And so it seemed. We passed other couples strolling in the park, lots of dog walkers, a police officer. "See? Nothing that would bother Charles Bronson," Edward remarked when we were halfway to the hotel and he was giving me his jacket to cover my bare shoulders.

"Who?"

On the rest of our walk, I learned a lot about the cultural significance of the vigilantism in "Death Wish."

* * *

A cart was awaiting me in our room. A split of champagne, a few silver cloches, a bottle of red wine. I slipped off my shoes in relief as I stared at it.

I raised my eyebrows at my husband. "Do you need to get me drunk to have your way with me? I didn't realize I played so hard to get."

He ignored that. "Have you ever had champagne?" he asked as he loosened the wire cage over the cork.

"I've had it at weddings." Not ours, though, in deference to Charlie's position. "It tasted … harsh."

"Hmm. I can't make you any promises that you'll like this, but – I would like to get you drunk. A little. Enough so you'll let me have my way with you." He winked, and maneuvered the cork from the bottle. It released with a soft hiss. Edward poured the wine into two flutes and handed one to me.

"You're drinking?"

"No, but I can do this –" he clinked his glass with mine. "Try it." I took a sip somewhat self-consciously, knowing now how closely he was watching my reaction. I held it in my mouth a moment before swallowing.

"This is better. It's smoother than I remember." I took another sip, feeling the tickle of the carbonation. "It's quite nice, actually. So what else is awaiting me in this big seduction scene?"

I walked to the cart and lifted one cloche, revealing a bowl of tiny black globes on a bed of ice. "It's … something I don't know how to eat. What is it?"

"Caviar. It's fairly uncomplicated, I gather. How does it smell to you?"

"Briny. And to you?"

"Extraordinarily fishy, but briny is how it should smell to humans."

I finished my glass and Edward poured me another, smirking, before he took off his tie, and I had to interrupt my inspection of the cart to watch his graceful movements.

The other cloches hid fruit – tiny pears and figs, which I'd never eaten – and cheese. There was a small pearlescent spoon for the caviar, and I filled a plate with it and blinis and the fruit and cheese and carried it and my glass out to the little table on the terrace. Edward followed me out a few minutes later, carrying the blanket.

I looked at him curiously. "Does that even work out here?"

"I had the concierge send up an extension cord," he explained.

"You really have this all planned out, don't you?" I stopped eating to stare at him in speculation.

"The plan includes your eating, so take a breath, and drink your wine," he ordered. He sat down on the chaise on the other side of the table from me. "I'll just be sitting here, basking."

I nodded glumly. Spontaneity would have to wait.

"What do you think of the caviar?" he asked. I took a bite, and undecided, took another.

"It's delicious. Salty, but in a nice way. I like these little pancakes, too."

I finished eating, and went inside to pour myself some red wine; Edward had already opened the bottle, which had Spanish on the label. I took my glass outside, definitely feeling a little drunk and stepping with exaggerated care over the extension cord, and Edward opened his arms to me in invitation. I put the glass down and shrugged off his jacket, then climbed in between his legs, my back to him. He reached over and handed me my glass before arranging the blanket between and around us. I sipped my wine in silence for a while, looking up at the sky, the clouds reflecting back the lights of the city. As with the caviar, I had to let my taste buds adjust to the mix of flavors of the wine.

Unbidden, the image of Garsevan from the night before came to my mind, accompanied by a feeling of helplessness. The Georgian may have had no intention of harming me, but I was always having to be safeguarded, and I didn't want that. I wanted to be stronger. I wanted to be as capable of protecting my husband as he was of protecting me. Hell, I wanted superpowers.

"Edward, will I have a gift?" I asked.

I could feel his muscles tense behind me. "Why are you thinking of that now?" he asked softly.

"Because of the 'colleague' last night. You all have to look after me so much. I hope there's something I'll be able to bring to you all someday."

"Did you have something in mind?"

"Oh, I don't know – shooting flames from my eyes? Flying? Invisibility?"

"Ah, we're much more subtle than that."

"Walking down the street without tripping?"

"That is indeed an excellent gift," he agreed, but sighed. "Our family's concentration of gifts is an anomaly, you know. Powers are rare – otherwise Aro wouldn't be so avid about collecting talent. But I'm afraid that you will have some ability. Your immunity to me, to Jane, to Aro… will manifest itself in some way, and we won't know what it is exactly until it happens. You know, invisibility's not such a bad guess, since you can hide your mind…." He shook his head. "But then, look at Jasper – it's not a straight road from being charismatic to being an empath. You'll have something, and I'm sorry."

I twisted around to look at him; I would have spilt my wine if any were left in my glass. This apology, in contrast to his others today, was completely sincere. "You're sorry? Why?"

"To whom much is given, much will be expected," he quoted somberly. He took my glass and put it on the table. "A talent is a burden, a responsibility." I know I looked skeptical, for he sighed again and said, "I'm rifling through thoughts I'd rather never ever know so that I can figure out if anyone is suspicious of us. Jasper feels responsible for our happiness even though he knows logically that he's not. And think of Alice, who has taken it upon herself to try to protect us by imagining different scenarios, different decisions, a thousand different alternative universes, and who blames herself when someone like Victoria finds a loophole. What's worse is that I blamed her, even though I know better than anyone the limits to her ability. I have a cacophony in my head, Jasper's sometimes a maelstrom of emotion, but Alice carries the heaviest burden of all of us. If she weren't energetic even for a vampire, I don't know how she could bear it."

"Would you give it up then, your ability?" I asked quietly.

"I wish… I could turn it off. Being with you, with your silence, is the closest I can get to that blessed state without being utterly alone. That is your gift to me, a powerful gift from a human. And you force me to be more human by requiring me to use my other senses, the senses everybody uses to try to read the people around us."

He paused to run his hand along my elevated hip, down the skirt of my dress and back up, pushing the fabric out of the way. His fingers were warm sparks on my thigh. "Now I should mention your other power, the one where you make me stop thinking about all my burdens and responsibilities save one."

I moaned a little. "Which one?"

"My responsibility to make you forget your name as frequently as possible." The carnality in his voice was tangible, and I had to remember to breathe so I had air to chastise him.

"You're trying to distract me again."

"Indeed, this is the part of the seduction scene where I have my way with you," he murmured, sliding his hand further under my dress, cupping my bottom. He groaned softly as I twisted more, brushing against his erection, tantalizingly covered by only the thin wool of his suit pants. "I seem to recall on the island that you had no objection to al fresco love-making," he said. "Is my recollection correct?"

"Yes," I said, but I froze a little under his hand. The shrubs on each end of our terrace gave us an illusion of privacy, not the reality. "We're not on the island now."

"Don't worry. No one can see us. The rooms adjoining ours are unoccupied during our stay."

"How do —"

"I reserved them as well."

"I think you _were_ a Boy Scout, a morally crooked one," I said faintly.

"I think the evidence will show that in many ways I'm quite straight … Shall we go look at the view?" he asked, his voice smooth, hypnotic.

I nodded, mesmerized. He set me on my feet and led me to the balustrade, the blanket hanging obediently from his shoulders. Central Park was a big patch of darkness to our right, but there were streetlights below us and lighted windows in the apartments across from us. People didn't seem to use curtains at home here either.

"Are you sure no one --"

"Yes. Trust me."

He moved to stand behind me, his body now warm against my back, the air cool on my throat. His arms pulled the blanket around me again. "Can you grab the ends, here?" he asked, and I wrapped them around my hands. Our silhouette would be that of some strange mythical creature, a two-headed beast …

I forgot all that suddenly, for he had swept the fall of my hair off the left side of my neck and bent down to kiss the skin there, his tongue swiping a path from ear to shoulder strap. A talented mouth for sure, one to make my flesh tingle. I had to rest my swaddled hands on the balustrade to support myself as his lips murmured soundlessly against the nape of my neck, up to my hairline, over to my ear and my jaw, his hands comfortably warm on my hips. My breaths were loud in the dark night, louder than the cars on the street below.

"I've been thinking about this since Chicago," he said huskily, and the zipper on my sundress hissed open. He ducked his head to kiss between my bare shoulder blades as before and then his hands snaked into the open back and around my waist --- mmmmm, that felt heavenly – and then, relentlessly, ascended, as he had envisioned, to cup my breasts, one in each palm, his fingers moving delicately on my skin before squeezing, the pressure just the right side of rough. I moaned forcefully and arched my back into his hands, and I wanted to touch him in turn, but I couldn't let go of the blanket. I was trapped here as his hands stroked my nipples, teased them into blissful sensation. Then his right hand was gone, only to reappear on my thigh, pulling up the fabric of my skirt, slipping under it and around my hip over my panties and down, down –- and stopping abruptly.

"Bella," he said in the softest of whispers, "as I promised, no one can see us, but…" He paused briefly as I tensed. "But there is a woman three rooms away on her terrace, listening. She wonders if she should drag her husband away from his spreadsheets, but she's afraid he'll say no. Do you want to stop?" He paused again. "Or should we inspire her?"

I most definitely did not want to stop, but I also didn't want my knowledge of her presence to distract me. Oh, who was I kidding – when was I ever distracted when we made love? Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but I breathed out, "Inspiration," and Edward's hands went immediately back to work, and I returned to whimpering helplessly.

His fingers stroked me softly, then with more power, and I writhed under them, my hands still gripping the blanket. Thank goodness it was a king. I pushed back against him, feeling the hardness of his length, making him hiss. "Oh fuck, Bella, you're going to have to talk to me if we do this," he rasped. "Can you do that, baby?"

"God… yes." I'd do anything he asked right now. He shoved my dress up to my waist, and stepped back slightly, pulling my hips with him, then ripping at the seams of my cotton bikinis so the fabric fell to the ground. The leather of his belt slapped my behind gently as he undid his pants, giving me a jolt, and then I felt a shower of buttons – he had ripped open his shirt too, allowing him to press his bare skin against mine for a moment.

"Remember, tell me," he whispered, and he guided his cock to my entrance, dragging the head through the wetness there, then pushing in exquisitely slowly partway, and out, and in more fully. He held on to my hips to keep me steady.

"Tell me," he said again, and he thrust in more quickly.

"Yes," I moaned.

Harder, quicker. "Yes."

Again, harder. "Yes."

Another yes, then another.

"Baby, are you sure?"

"Oh, God, yes."

Again. Again. "Oh, right there. You feel so deep in me," I groaned, and he groaned too at my words. His right hand left my hip and moved back to my clit, moving in softer contrast to his harder thrusts, harder than I could ever bear it before. I braced my hands on the railing so I could push back more, but oh, his fingers were making me come, muscles tightening around him.

"Baby, let me see you," he said as I came down, his voice needy, and I turned and looked over my shoulder at him, his eyes burning, his face so beautiful, and he cried out as he continued to thrust till he was spent, again, again.

He slumped over me for a second, then pulled out, and I found his shredded shirt between my thighs and his arm around my waist, helping me stand up. My legs felt like jelly. I drew the blanket tighter around us, and his lips were back at my ear.

"She seems to have found us sufficiently inspirational," he murmured.

"Who?"

"Our eavesdropper." Oh, I had indeed forgotten about her. Did I feel embarrassed? Should I feel embarrassed that I had been able to make my husband groan uncontrollably, that he had done the same to me? Not in the slightest, I decided. Really, I should be proud. But was I ready for my family to hear me? Ummm ... no.

"She's bringing her husband outside," Edward reported. "We could eavesdrop ourselves, if you like."

"No," I said firmly. "Let's go inside and make our own noises again."

* * *

_A/N: As always, thanks for reading, and thanks, thanks, thanks for reviewing. __Really._

_And: est-ce qu'il y a une lectrice francophone qui veut lire un chapitre pour moi? Dites-moi, svp. _


	7. Chapter 7: YNY

_Disclaimer: It still all belongs to Stephenie Meyer._

Chapter 7: YNY

It was normally a six-hour drive to Hanover from New York, and even Edward wasn't able to cut much off the time, because of traffic close in and the ubiquity of state troopers further out. The knowledge of the Ivy League hell awaiting me was making me nervous, so I thought instead of our last day in the city.

Our siblings had evaded the beach patrol and had continued surfing long into the night, returning from Montauk only after I'd fallen asleep. After my breakfast, we met up and went to P.S. 1 in Queens, a Museum of Modern Art outpost that had an art installation involving some guy's 3,000 vinyl records embedded in the floor. As we stepped on the discs, the Cullens had a quiet but rather alarming conversation about wax cylinders versus 78s versus LPs versus eight-tracks versus CDs versus mp3s, a disconcerting reminder that I was a very recent blip in their family timeline.

Afterward, Alice and Rosalie dragged me off further into Queens to get fabrics for their house, promising Edward to feed me Indian for lunch, while their husbands took mine off with them to, as Emmett so delicately put it, "fucking Williamsburg" again for, I suspected, brazen questions at a bar with pool tables and a sufficiently incurious clientele.

As we made our way around the taco trucks in front of the subway station in Jackson Heights, I looked at Alice and said flatly, "You don't really need sari silks – you have an ulterior motive."

"We do need material," Alice insisted before Rosalie snickered, "Oh, we _definitely _want material."

Alice gave her a quelling look. "And yes, we do have an ulterior motive," Alice said. "We haven't _talked_ since the wedding."

I frowned at her. "I had this conversation with my mother already. It was short."

"She can't answer your questions. We can."

"Because you know a lot about thermodynamics?"

She frowned back at me. "I do, of course, but as for your particular situation I have little practical experience," she conceded. Then she brightened. "However, you two seem to be devising some creative solutions – I've been impressed!"

I muttered under my breath at Alice's unnaturally derived knowledge, but obediently followed my sisters-in-law into a shop where they chose lengths and lengths of bright fabric in probably record time, judging from the reaction of the two South Asian men who ran the place; I also saw some deep blue material among their purchases that I suspected was somehow destined for me, but Alice said nothing.

It was human lunchtime then, and it was a trip to watch Alice walk along the line of restaurants on the main street of the neighborhood, eyes glazing over briefly before each entrance until she found one that she could see I'd like. She was better than a Zagat's.

"So, go for it," Alice commanded once I had my saag paneer and she and Rosalie had cups of tea they could pretend to nurse.

"'Go for it?' That's going to work on me?" I asked in disbelief.

"It's the best gambit I could envision," Alice said, shrugging. "Though since we never hear you, maybe there's nothing going on," she added wickedly. I stared at her, feeling both relief that I had succeeded in being discreet and a blush of embarrassment over the topic. "Calm down. We don't deliberately listen. Believe me, you won't want to listen to us either."

The shame was, I did have other, non-temperature questions, but I was unsure how skilled Rosalie was at hiding her thoughts, and I figured that asking her was tantamount to asking Edward, so I might as well do that. When I got the guts.

That meant I spent my meal fending off their bids to trip me up. I got caught only once, as their questions and innuendo continued under the wail of sitar music.

"You know, when he goes down on you –" Rosalie started, and I raised my eyebrows at her. _"What?" _she nearly shrieked. "I spent an afternoon on a conference call with Tanya on the subject and he's not – I'm getting Emmett after him," she said, grabbing her phone from her bag and starting to type.

"Wait, wait, he does!" I said in a panic.

Rosalie put her phone down. "Good to know," she drawled, and Alice tittered. I am an idiot, I thought, and sure enough, when we met up with the guys again at the hotel, I saw Rosalie whispering something to my husband. But I forgot to ask what, because Edward hurried me out as the siblings paired up and disappeared to opposite ends of the suite … to take me to extended hours at the Met. Though not before he let me push him up against the wall in the corridor outside the suite and kiss him as hard as I could.

We had dinner in a brown and gold restaurant with spiky light fixtures and a view looking down at the lights dancing in the fountain at Columbus Circle. There was no separate charge for the bread this time, but one of our many servers did tell us the name of the cow that provided the butter. She lived in Vermont.

"Did you get the third degree as intensely as I did?" I asked after the waiters placed a dish involving oysters, caviar and tapioca in front of us and seemed inclined to leave us alone for a few minutes.

Edward winced. "Probably much more," he said. "They have a good argument - that since I know everything about them, they should get to know at least something about me. The counterargument is you haven't invaded their privacy, so they shouldn't invade yours, and they found that convincing. It still didn't shut up Emmett, though.

"Oh, look -" he nodded slightly toward a man in a red and orange shirt who had just sat down a few tables over.

"It's David Byrne," Edward said quietly. He didn't bother to wait for my question. "He was the singer for the Talking Heads."

I sneaked a look at the man's shock of white hair. "As I said, _old,_ Grandpa," I murmured, and beamed at my even older man.

Just for that, he ordered an extra dessert.

It was still dark when I woke up several hours later, not sure why I wasn't still sleeping until I realized that Edward wasn't next to me.

"Sorry," he said softly from the door. "Go back to sleep, love. I was just saying goodbye to everyone. They're leaving before dawn so it'll be a faster drive to New Hampshire."

"Mmmm, come back to bed," I said, my voice raspy, and stretched, and that was so pleasant that I did it again and felt the familiar downward spiral of want in my belly, for he was already naked and next to me under the covers. Sadly, though, he had cooled down, as we discovered when he touched my very warm arm experimentally.

"Your hands will have to wait," I said, and rolled to my side so I could switch on the bedside light. "Stay under the blanket."

At least _I _could touch _him – _and take my time doing it, too. I rolled back and watched him as I ran my fingertips languorously under the filaments and over his shoulders, down his arms, across his chest, his flesh cool under mine. Along his ribs as he shuddered, his thighs as he moaned, his hips as he whimpered. I whimpered too, my need stoked by his responsiveness, the feel of him under my hands.

I could even pretend that his skin was warming up because of my touch.

My breaths shortened as I continued to stroke him, my hands finally going to his erection, my fingers trailing over his length, around the tip and down to the soft skin between his legs, idly, languidly, without seeking more than just feeling him.

"Am I?" he breathed out.

"Hard? Yes."

He growled softly. "Who's the tease now?"

Hmm, I could show him teasing. I moved his left hand out from under the covers and held it between my own, regarding it contemplatively for a moment before sucking the middle finger into my mouth without warning. He hissed loudly, and I scraped my teeth along the skin as I retreated.

"Yes," I decided with a smirk.

He turned onto his side and pushed me to my back. He ran his wet finger from my lips down my throat and torso to my sex, abruptly sliding it in and then replacing it with his cock. I inhaled sharply when I saw him suddenly hovering over me, in me, ohhhh….

"Don't I get any … kisses…or compliments?" I managed to stutter out as he moved slowly above me. "Don't I deserve a little foreplay?"

"From all the evidence, you found warming me up quite arousing. And now I'm … going to give you a … demonstration of my … remarkable powers of recovery," he answered. He gasped even though his movements were gentle and small and then still as he arched and released in me with a moan. I gulped in a breath and gazed at his face, fascinated by his fugitive expressions of tension and bliss and calm, and then, well, lust again as he stared back at me.

His movements in me had been so gentle, I realized, that he must have been in that end of the spectrum that was beyond my senses, that he found fulfilling and I could not yet. A shudder ran through me at the thought. His face was curious.

"Was that A to B?" I asked, remembering our conversation about the range of vampire sensitivity, about touches that were too delicate for me to feel, and touches that would be fatal.

His face cleared. "Maybe B to C? It's not a hard and fast delineation."

"No, that wasn't hard and fast at -"

He shut me up with a kiss.

"_Now_ you deserve a little foreplay," he declared when he'd released my lips. He buried his face in my neck, and I could feel him hardening in me, his recovery time elapsed. I moaned before I remembered the rest of our family.

"Edward, are they gone?"

"What would you do if they weren't?" he asked, his lips murmuring into my shoulder.

"Maybe you could gag me," I said as a joke, but Edward tensed, and turned his face to look at me.

"Bella, we can't now," he said, his voice serious.

"Huh?"

"It's too dangerous. You have to be able to talk to me. Afterward, I'll happily tie you up … well, chains seem to be slightly more durable …"

"What?" I squeaked, but suddenly I remembered a French movie I'd come across inadvertently one day when I was channel-surfing. When I had seen shots of chains and ropes and whips I'd hastily switched, because I figured it was one of those torture movies that were so inexplicably popular. Those chains now took on a whole new meaning. "People really use chains for … sex?"

"You've _never_ heard of that?" the 100-year-old voyeur asked.

"I'm a teenager who's had one, extraordinarily cautious, boyfriend. No."

"And what do you think?"

"I don't know. It's so…" I hesitated, because I could tell from him in me that this didn't fall in the category of food sex for Edward. Not unappealing. "Unexpected," I finally said, then realized, "I could tie _you_ up, though, now…"

"No," he grunted, smoothly turning us so we were side by side, my right leg propped on his hip, "not now. I can't do this if I'm tied up," he said, his hands now caressing my breasts, his thumbs tracing circles of heat around the circle of pink, the spiral of desire now tighter; each circuit made my muscles clench around him. One hand eventually made its way to my bottom, squeezing me there, pushing me closer. I was beyond ready, but this position seemed impractical.

"Edward, this doesn't work - I can't move this way," I whispered as I tried to shift my hips, showing him.

"It does work, because I can," he said, and showed me.

I was torn from my daydream by the Volvo's sudden swerve. "Thank you, American capitalism," Edward muttered as we sped down an off-ramp not far from the city.

"What's happening?" I asked, confused. We were now in the parking lot of a huge shopping mall hard by the highway, and as Edward pulled into a spot I could see a neon apple outlined on a brick facade. "You're taking me to Applebee's _again_?"

"I need to get out of this car, _for some reason_, Bella, and where there's an Applebee's there's apparently always a Bed, Bath and Beyond," he said, pointing at a white mass looming over the restaurant. "Let's get the mate to the winning blanket, and let me get some fresh air."

And so we did. This time, he didn't need directions.

Not long after our shopping excursion, we passed a sign for an amusement park.

"Have you been there?" I asked.

"Many times, starting in the Thirties. You'd like it, I think - it still has some of the original rides. We've all been on the rollercoaster a lot. Well, not Jasper. The teenage hormones at night are bit much for him."

"You don't find the rides _scary_, do you?"

"Silly girl. But the sensations can be pleasant."

There was silence for a while.

"You're saying that I'm not going on any rides anytime soon, aren't you?"

"Not unless I can inspect every bolt. I read an article recently -"

"Edward!"

"Please?" He cheated, locking his eyes onto mine. "I worry about you being hit by a car. I worry that you're going to fall. I worry that something's going to fall on you. I worry about _food poisoning._ And you have to eat and cross the street and breathe outside air. You don't have to go on the Dragon Coaster. Could I get a break on this?"

"Okay, okay," I said in surrender. And I did have a burning question. "So, who in the family uses chains?" I asked, figuring that a surprise attack would have the best results.

The car jolted perhaps a fraction of an inch, but Edward didn't respond. Attack repulsed. "Do you really expect me to answer that?" he said finally.

"No," I said with resignation. "But since Rosalie tricked information out of me yesterday, I thought maybe I could get some dirt on her…"

I also still wasn't sure what the chains were used for exactly, but Edward cut me off before I had a chance to ask.

"Could you talk about something more productive for a while?" He frowned and shifted in his seat. "Maybe I should say less productive. Or you could take a nap? We have a long way to go."

I sighed and twisted around in my seat to grab my knapsack from the back. He watched me pull out the Dartmouth course catalog.

"No nap?" he asked, puzzled. I hadn't gone back to sleep last night after he'd accidentally awakened me. Though I wondered if that should be "accidentally."

"I'm really not sleepy," I said. It was true. I was too worried about my college career to be sleepy.

"I must be losing my touch."

"Not likely," I said, surprised into a laugh. Usually, I didn't like to read in the car, but Edward's driving was so smooth that the motion didn't bother me. I opened the catalog, propping my bare feet on the dashboard for support. If he flinched, I didn't see it.

"So, on Tuesday at 10 I can take remedial writing –" I started.

"It's not remedial writing."

"Dartmouth didn't send _you_ a letter saying you had to take a seminar in expository writing." I realized that when I had taken the SAT I was practically catatonic and that my essay was either lifeless or gibberish, but the letter still stung.

"I'm taking it with you."

"Surely you don't want to take all your classes with me," I said.

"I'll be in college with you for the first time only once."

I flipped through the catalog, skipping over the foreign language listings, since I'd gathered that it'd be more efficient for me to wait on memorizing conjugations.

"So, I shouldn't try to learn Georgian this quarter," I mused. "Are there classes I should take now rather than later?"

He considered for half a second. "Introduction to Psychology."

"Because I won't understand the way humans tick afterward?"

"No, because you inevitably have to be a subject for graduate students' experiments for your grade," he explained. I looked at the course description for Intro to Psych. Yep, 15 percent of the grade was participation in experiments. "We skew the results."

"Oh. So if I take that, what would you do?"

"There's a Russian literature class nearby at the same time."

I looked at the Russian Department section in the catalog. "You want to take 'Vampires, Witches and Werewolves in Russian Folklore'?"

He exaggerated his shudder. "Most decidedly not the werewolves. No, I'll take Special Topics."

He'd be reading novels in the original in that class. "There are a lot of prerequisites," I observed.

"I think I can persuade the professor to accept me, since Rosalie tells me I'm such a cunning linguist."

I buried my face in my hands. "I can't believe she said that," I said, my voice muffled by my fingers. "Even _I_ have heard that line."

As the suburbs changed to forested hills and old industrial towns, I looked for other courses that Edward could attend fairly regularly; he already knew which buildings on campus allowed for a shaded walk from parking, and which had underground entrances. Evening classes were ideal, of course, or at least evening discussion sections. We settled on an art history survey course and one on the 19th-century English novel, even though Edward noted that I'd already read several of the books mentioned in the course description. But I felt comforted by the possibility that I might not be the most unprepared student in the class, even if one of the novels was "Mansfield Park" and another was "Frankenstein." Literary monsters paled next to the real ones in my life.

We took the scenic route, crossing the midsection of Vermont, perhaps driving by the cow that provided our butter, through the Green Mountains, shorter and rounder than the peaks of the Olympic Range. Edward suggested we stop for dinner when we weren't far from White River Junction, on the New Hampshire border.

"Why?" I asked. "Aren't we very close?"

"Yes," he said slowly, an undercurrent in his voice that I recognized, that made me flush. He turned to look at me. "I think I'll be too tired to cook when we get there, though."

We pulled up to a diner that prided itself on supporting local agriculture. A jukebox played '70s songs. We were seated in a booth in what looked like an old train car and a young brunette looking intently at her order pad asked us what we wanted to drink. She had an Eastern European accent; she must have been in the country on a temporary visa to do a job the local kids didn't want.

"Just water, thanks," Edward told her. She froze, looking at him closely for the first time, then recoiled. Her mouth opened and closed, but she didn't say anything. Wherever she was from, the telling of folk stories was definitely a living art.

"Um, I'll have an apple cider, please," I said, to draw her attention away from Edward. Her head whipped around to me, and if anything, she looked even more horrified than before. She nodded and spun away, her hand gripping her pad for dear life. My intervention hadn't done much good.

When she was gone, I lifted my eyebrows in inquiry. "I don't know exactly what's in her mind, because she speaks Albanian, I think - something not Slavic," Edward said. "But she was thinking of woods and fangs."

"You don't have –" I started, indignantly.

"She knows to believe what her instincts tell her," he said. "She's from a land of blood feuds and ghosts."

"Should we be worried?"

"That she'll tell her family back home that she saw an undead Turk?" He shrugged. "I don't imagine that she'll be approaching a policeman here."

"It's curious - I've never seen a complete stranger react that way to you," I said. "Unease, yes. Disgust." He rolled his eyes, knowing I was referring to the wolves. "And entirely too much lust. But not outright fear."

"I've seen it quite often, though not in the last couple of years. It's because of you," he said.

"Because people see me with you?"

"Probably, but there's more – Em said that I was getting soft after you arrived in Forks. By trying to make myself less frightening to you, I became less frightening to everyone.''

"I made you lose your mojo?" I asked.

"Are you sure you know what that means? Because you definitely gave me my mojo," he replied with a wink.

We were interrupted by the arrival of my cider, carried by a thirty-ish waitress with a perky auburn ponytail, obviously a local. I wondered if our original waitress had pleaded a migraine to get out of serving us when her instincts were telling her to run. The look Ms. Ponytail gave Edward was instinctive too, but it had nothing to do with folk tales. She licked her lips as she looked at my husband and waited for our order. I almost wished for the frightened Albanian to return.

When Edward asked for the check, I went to the restroom to prepare for the last leg of our trip. As I emerged from the single stall, the girl was waiting. Our eyes met in the mirror above the sink as I washed my hands. The circles under my eyes from my interrupted sleep contrasted with the flush on my cheeks.

"Are you okay?" she asked me, her voice soft but colored by something I couldn't identify; it wasn't fear, though, which puzzled me. We were alone, and I saw no reason to pretend I didn't know what she meant.

"We've been together two years," I overstated the duration somewhat in an effort to be reassuring. "He's my husband." I didn't tell her that what she expected was going to happen to me certainly would, that I wanted it, or that four other vampires were an easy run from her workplace. "He's not what you think." _Not exactly._

At the word "husband," she nodded as if I'd confirmed something for her. "Please, let me…" she trailed off, looking for the right phrase, "…protect you." I was pretty certain she wasn't hiding a wreath of garlic flowers in her blouse, and that whatever charm or amulet or spell she had would have no effect on Edward.

"Sure," I said. She put a slightly damp hand on my forehead, and murmured quietly for a few minutes. When she finished, she crossed herself in a way I hadn't seen before, touching her right shoulder and then her left with two fingers, and sighed.

"I pray for the safety of your soul and your body, to survive the child," she explained. It was my turn to freeze.

"No, no children," I mumbled. "That's not going to happen."

"Yes," she insisted, her tone now exultant. "It's his reason to keep you alive. You will see when he gets what he wants."

Her duty apparently done, she walked out of the restroom, leaving me shaking with a mixture of rage and disbelief. You bitch, I thought viciously as the violent shudders of anger rolled through me. Kaure's story hadn't bothered me, because she had genuinely worried about me, worried that the legends could be true and that someone she knew would be hurt. This girl - I hated her smugness, her rush to judge, her belief that I would be properly punished for loving someone taboo; I hated that there was no possibility that Edward hadn't heard this. I quickly splashed water on my face to cool my angry cheeks, for I knew if I lingered he would go mad.

He was waiting for me by the exit, eyes intent on mine. In my peripheral vision, I could see the forecaster of my doom standing by the swinging doors leading to the kitchen with another waitress, a pale brunette like herself, perhaps a countrywoman. I couldn't help myself – I walked straight into his arms and pressed myself against him. The relief was immediate, even though I felt the angry tension in his muscles. Above me, I could sense him directing a lethal glare at the girl. Not helping, Edward.

We got in the car and drove in silence for a few minutes.

"Bella?"

"I'm all right. I mean, Renee warned me that once I was married everyone would start talking about kids, but this is ridiculous," I said, trying to mask my fury and lighten the mood.

It didn't work.

"I'm sorry – I couldn't decipher her plans," he said. "Her self-righteousness when she talked to you…." His hands hardened on the steering wheel.

"Are you upset?" This bothered me more than what the girl had told me.

"After decades of my family being called freaks because of our looks, or snobs because of our isolation, or perverts because of the way we live, I'm not hurt by insults. It's easy for me to see the insecurities behind them. But when Jacob or someone else says that I'm going to hurt you – that's harder for me because of my own insecurities, because I know how easily I _can…"_

"Stop it," I whispered, my own anger forgotten when I heard the bleakness in his voice. "You won't hurt me."

"Not the way she said, but I can," he repeated.

We were quiet for most of the rest of the way to Hanover; I stared out the window at this area that would be our home for the next few months. We crossed the Connecticut River into New Hampshire, and drove along the river road, slowing down frequently as we passed groups of bicyclists.

I didn't have much experience in these matters, since I'd been otherwise occupied in the period when most high school seniors toured campuses, so I didn't know how Hanover stacked up as a college town. Under the streetlamps, I could see a big grassy quadrangle intersected by pathways, a lot of red-brick buildings from the 1800s, some frat houses and an abundance of green bunting in storefronts. There was an old hotel for parents to stay at during their child's graduation, a movie theater that showed foreign films, a shop filled with Dartmouth sweatshirts. My future classmates strolled along sidewalks shaded by huge trees. This place had more similarity to a movie set than to one of the state universities I'd once assumed would be my alma mater.

"Do you like it?" Edward asked me.

"I still can't believe I'm going to try to go to school here."

"It's going to be a breeze."

"For you it is," I muttered.

He smiled and shook his head, and I was glad to see that his mood had improved. "The difference between Dartmouth and Arizona State isn't as much as you might think," he said.

"I thought it was about $30,000 a year."

"Plus donations to the capital fund. Not much at all," he said serenely. "Ready to go see our house?"

It would be the first look for both of us, though we knew a bit of what to expect from the pictures Esme had shown us. Edward drove east, away from the river. The houses quickly grew sparse and the terrain wooded and hilly. We eventually turned onto an unmarked gravel road that seemed to meander aimlessly for quite a distance, before a building abruptly appeared amid the trees.

It was easy to see its attractions for the Cullens. The front of the one-story house was completely shaded, and the windows were too high for any curious visitors to peer into. Thick brush impeded access to the sides and back. The style was Modernist, though with a pitched roof in concession to the snow; the wood of the house was weathered gray by five decades of winter. I gave Edward a skeptical look.

"Not a fan of mid-century architecture by a Marcel Breuer manqué?" he asked. "Come on, let's see the inside before you call for the wrecking ball."

For the second time in two weeks, Edward picked me up to carry me over the threshold of a new house. I'd switched from danger magnet to property magnate. Three steps up and two steps in the covered entry, and we were in a dark interior. Edward switched on the lights and hit some buttons on a keypad, and as at the Forks house, there was a steel gate that ascended, letting in the gray twilight through sliding glass doors in the back. I should have guessed. Esme liked her window walls.

It felt bigger than I would have imagined from the outside. Edward set me down in the living room, which ran the depth of the house. There was a period fireplace of stacked bluestone, white ceilings without embellishments, pale plank flooring, an upright piano against one wall. The Danish modern furniture perfectly suited the place. I sank down into a red sofa with a low back. It was more comfortable than I expected.

"No grand?" I asked, gazing at the piano.

"There's one at the other house, so Rosalie can use it. It would be too loud here. And I can play this one with headphones so I don't disturb your sleep."

"You say I sleep like the dead."

"I don't let you sleep enough." He sounded a little guilty, and I wondered again about this morning.

"I sleep plenty," I assured him.

In front of me was a blond wood coffee table in the shape of a boomerang, and on top of that was champagne in an ice bucket and two flutes. A piece of paper folded in half was resting against the bucket. I opened it and laughed. "She's soooo predictable," I said in mock annoyance.

"Bella," the paper read. "Welcome to your new house! I hope it's the birthplace of many wonderful memories for you." She was obviously plagiarizing Hallmark. "Now go look in the closet first this time, dammit! Alice."

I handed it over to Edward to read, and looked around the room some more. While the furniture was spare and the surfaces clean, the walls were relatively crowded with paintings, many of which didn't really fit the mid-century-modern aesthetic. They all, I realized, had a similar theme.

Edward had long ago read the note and was looking at me.

"Did Emmett pick out the art in here?" I asked suspiciously.

"No, this was an all-Esme project. Why?"

"Because all the paintings are of … food." I looked around again. There were Flemish still lifes of cornucopias, Cubist fruit bowls, collages of café menus, a Post-Impressionist breakfast table. I pointed at this and frowned.

"We saw that in New York," I said weakly. "At the Met." For a dizzying moment, I had an image of Esme dazzling a guard into letting her walk a 4'x5' Bonnard out of the museum.

"Deep breath," Edward smirked at me. "It's a later version of that painting, and we came by it legitimately, just after the second war. If you look at the two side by side, you can play 'spot eight things that are different' with them. And ours, of course, is better." He sat down next to me as I stared at the deep roses and blues of the painting.

"Okay." I tried to adjust my thinking. "So these are all Esme's subliminal messages to get me to eat?"

Edward shook his head. "They'd have to be hidden to be subliminal. I'd say they're quite blatant messages. Look -" He pointed to another painting, one I hadn't really noticed because of its muted colors. It was a Hudson River School-style landscape with cliffs and a stream and a family of … deer.

"Oh," I said. "That one's for you, huh?"

"Esme is definitely a mom." He flicked Alice's note like a Frisbee into the fireplace across the room, then lofted the champagne bottle from the bucket and opened it, allowing only a few bubbles to escape.

"Alice is trying to get me drunk now, too?" I asked, eyeing the bottle. I suspected she had picked it out because of its Art Nouveau flowers.

"It's for us to drink to our new home – well, toast it, at least," he said. "It's up to you to decide to get drunk, though I admit I enjoyed watching you drink on our terrace at the Carlyle." His voice deepened. "And I _greatly _enjoyed what came afterward." He handed me a glass, and we clinked, my face pinker, my breath faster because of his words. He leaned over to kiss me, then stood up. "I'm going to retrieve our things from the car, and then we can look around."

So he labored and I drank, but he did it so quickly that I barely had time to finish my champagne in tiny sips. I put my glass down when he offered me his hand, and we walked toward the back of the house.

"How far away are the others?" I asked.

"Twenty miles by car, but five miles as the crow flies, or as the vampire runs."

"Good," I blurted out, knowing they'd be out of his hearing range.

We flipped on lights as we went through the house. The back of the living room opened into a kitchen, which in turn opened into a dining room. The kitchen was new, but its modern lack of ornamentation fit in with the rest of the house. Along a hallway were three other rooms, the first a study that we looked into quickly, the second our bedroom, which I found much more interesting. One side was the glass wall, one side housed the closet and built-in shelves that I suspected were filled with several dozen sets of sheets, and a third had another, closed door. But my eyes focused on the king-sized sleigh bed I already knew about. The covers were folded down and I could see the familiar electric blanket already nestled among the pale blue sheets that matched the pale blue stripes on the white walls.

I started to ask if it was plugged in, but I got sidetracked by an odd sound, a faint whirr of a motor, coming from the second door. It had to lead to our bathroom, and a motor meant –

"Edward, is that what I think it is?" I asked with a hopeful grin.

He moved so he was blocking the door and held his hands up. "Now, Bella, sweetheart, darling, I know you hate surprises – you've told me often enough – and I have to confess that I haven't told you everything about this house," he said, obviously trying to stifle a smile. "So I want you to take a deep breath and prepare yourself mentally for what I imagine will be a traumatic experience for –"

"Edward!" I tried to step around him into the bathroom, but he wrapped an arm around my waist, immobilizing me. "Let me go!"

"I will, but first you have to promise that you won't resent me for surprising you -"

"Jerk!"

He laughed and released me then, and I eagerly opened the door.

The room was softly lighted and steamy, for I was right, and there was a round hot tub lined in black bubbling away merrily; Alice must have started it when she dropped off the champagne. I couldn't help but squeal in delight.

"Is it ready for us?" I asked, turning to Edward just behind me. My breath caught, because he already had his shirt off, and I hadn't seen him all day. If there were a prize for objectifying one's husband, I would win it handily.

"There's one way to find out," he said as I gaped at him, and an instant later he had sunk to his chin in the water. "It's perfect."

I found a linen closet with towels and carried several to the side of the tub. I then undressed as quickly as I could and hurried into the water, sighing as the heat sank into my skin, just bearably hot. I was ready to launch myself at Edward, but he shook his head. "Not quite," he said. I sat on the sunken ledge running around the perimeter and distracted myself by looking around our new bathroom. Even with the hot tub there was plenty of space left; perhaps it had been two bathrooms once.

"I think," Edward said, "that there's room for a sauna in here too. You did suggest that a sauna would be a good idea …"

"Definitely," I purred, shutting down the little part of my brain that was wondering about the cost. "Now?"

"Try me."

I immediately glided over to him, the water making my movements much more graceful than on land. His chest was warm, so were his arms, so were his hands. "This is perfect, too, " I said, and Edward pulled me to him so I could wrap my legs around his hips, my bottom grazing his thighs, and - ah, his hard length pressed directly, deliciously on my clit. We both moaned at the contact, and his arms encircled my back so the currents couldn't float me away. His lack of buoyancy made him an immovable stone in the water, I realized.

We kissed and touched and enjoyed the warmth eddying around us. This position allowed me to drag my taut nipples against his, and his eyes closed in pleasure and his head tipped back so I could nibble on the side of his neck as best I could. His lovemaking this morning had been confirmation that even if I couldn't get purchase on his skin, even if my teeth were ineffectual against him and my hands weak, he obtained intense enjoyment from my touch, even more than I did from his, as difficult as that was to believe. I ran my fingers as lightly as I could down his back and over my interlocked ankles down as far as I could go, and he shuddered and mumbled softly. I had explored his body so much over the last month, but most of it was still terra incognita, and would remain so until my senses sharpened. _I had so much to look forward to…._

But for now my body had more immediate needs. I lifted myself slowly, thrillingly, against his length till my entrance was at his tip, and then pushed down against him – and stopped in shock at the unfamiliar sensation. Edward's eyes snapped open and I raised myself up again and down to find the same sensation, and stopped once more. I looked back at him in puzzlement, and said something that I'd never had to say before to him.

"It's … uncomfortable," I confessed, confused. "I don't know why."

He didn't seem surprised, though. "I wondered if this would happen - the water washes the lubrication away," he said softly, and I felt a pang of disappointment that my fantasies of making love in a hot tub wouldn't come true. But then he went on, "I can get something that we can try to make this work. And Bella, we have a brand-new bed just waiting for us to christen it. Shall we go do that?" His words put a big grin on my face, and I nodded happily. A second later, he had propelled us both up and over to the black-and-white stone floor of the bathroom, and was wrapping us in towels, and I was giggling uncontrollably.

"Edward, that was amazing!" I finally gasped. "But I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating there for a moment."

He smiled down at me and carried me into the other room. "I think I can show you some other amazing things tonight …" He sat me down on the edge of the bed and we dried each other off before he urged me to lie on my back on the heated sheets, my legs dangling and spread before him. "Let's see if the bed is a good height," he said mysteriously before he sank to his knees.

Oh_, that's_ what he meant, for his mouth was now perfectly aligned with my sex, and I moaned in anticipation. He ran his warmed hands from my hips to my knees and leaned forward to kiss the skin on the inside of my left thigh, his mouth moving inexorably up, up, up, until I was writhing and helplessly arching up as he reached my clit.

"Fuck, Edward," I cried out at the touch, surprising myself with my expletive, and he growled against my flesh, and, there's no way else to describe it, _attacked._ His tongue moved up, and down, and in, and on, and on, and on … My climax was so inevitable that even that moment that I continued to have to suppress, when I got the urge to move away and not let myself go, stayed inside its cave of embarrassment and didn't make an appearance. Instead, I screamed out Edward's name and gripped the sheets under me.

He rose then, breathing heavily, his eyes dark. He pulled my body closer to the edge of the bed and pushed into me swiftly, sliding in easily and in complete contrast to our earlier attempt in the water. I wrapped my legs around him again, and he stood taller so my hips rose off the bed and he put a strong hand on my lower back to support me. Oh, God, it didn't matter what height the bed was, because he could make it perfect.

My muscles continued to contract, now tightening around him instead of emptiness, and he groaned and shuddered and pulsed, and we were finally quiet. He pulled out and rearranged me on the bed and covered us both.

"That was amazing, too," I murmured at last, and then laughed, remembering. "And your side of the bed is going to be where the wet spot is."

"Of course, because you don't like cold, wet places, you told me."

I sighed, because someday that wouldn't matter. _Someday soon_, I told myself. "But I like you," I said. I moved to lie on top of him, and he stroked my back. Mmmm. "Very much, in fact. Even if you are forcing me to go on a hike tomorrow."

"Bella, it's part of orientation," he protested.

"So why don't the others have to go?" I lifted my head a bit so I could look at his face.

"Emmett, Rose and Jasper count as transfer students and so don't have to do all the orientation activities, but Alice is going to be in our group."

"Our last camping trip was just so _pleasant_," I grumbled. "And I'll get to experience enforced celibacy again."

The corner of his mouth lifted up. "If that's what worrying you, maybe I should just wear you out tonight."

He rolled me over and started to do just that, until the time came that I couldn't keep my eyes open.

"Ah, I can still put you to sleep," I heard him say with satisfaction as I fell into oblivion, too tired to even think anymore about the horrors that tomorrow would hold.

_A/N: My apologies to the non-Heads fans – I recently saw Byrne at per se, where I was going to have ExB dine anyway, so it just seemed that kismet wanted me to put him in._

_For those intrigued by the Exhibitionist Arms in the last chapter: it does exist, as you'll see if you do a search for "hotel" and "High Line" and "windows." It may also be NSFW._

_Thanks to all who reviewed and urged me to update, and also to Amethyst Jackson, who sent some folks my way with her rec. Her terrific AU story "Bonne Foi" is on my Favorites list, and you should check it out if you haven't already._


	8. Chapter 8: LNN

_Disclaimer: Everything that is Stephenie Meyer's I do not claim._

* * *

Chapter 8: LNN

Another benefit of our house was that there was an unbroken, if not completely direct, stretch of forest between it and the siblings' new home, allowing Alice to run to our house early the next morning and ride into town with us for the freshman horror hike. She gave me a scolding about my closet-ignoring habit as I ate an omelet at the steel kitchen island/breakfast table – Alice had dropped off eggs and juice yesterday as well as champagne – and Edward typed furiously on his laptop next to me, so quickly I wasn't sure how the computer could keep up, even with his taking breaks to touch my hair or my back.

"Hey, I went in there and got out some stuff," I said, gesturing to my new hiking pants and shoes and trying to placate her. "I promise I will look at everything soon – you're a godsend, thanks for the eggs, and now I'm appropriately suited up, thanks for the clothes. You, on the other hand, look as if you're going to lunch on Madison Avenue, with those heels on your boots."

Her tone was dismissive. "Hiking gear lacks the requisite - No!" she shrieked suddenly, and I jolted on my stool in alarm as Edward looked up, his fingers hovering above the keyboard. "The FDA is going to deny the application!"

Edward grunted in acknowledgment and resumed typing.

"Jeez, Alice, I expected to see Felix on our terrace," I complained. I immediately felt guilty over it, because Edward looked up again and stared out the glass doors as if he might find the behemoth guard lurking in the woods.

"We would have lost a lot of money on the trade Edward was executing - money I need to keep in Margiela," Alice said sedately before giving me a sly look. "How are you liking the house?"

"It's not my favorite architectural style," I answered, gesturing vaguely around the silver and turquoise kitchen, oddly reminiscent of a '50s Cadillac with really big tail fins, before cutting into my eggs. "But it has an unexpected charm –"

"Yes! I thought the hot tub would be perfect for you two!" Alice said brightly. The egg caught in my throat, and though I didn't intend to reply, the unguarded expression on my face must have clued her in to our, ah, difficulties in the jacuzzi.

"Jasper and I –" she started, but Edward cut her off, narrowing his eyes at her.

"No. And I've got it taken care of," he said. I took a very necessary sip of orange juice and continued eating in silence, mulling over their exchange. Aquatic sex for vampires must not require any accessories, I thought ruefully. One more human disadvantage of many.

* * *

When we arrived at the Dartmouth Green, we found a smattering of freshmen in hiking gear and a guy and a girl in Outing Club T-shirts and clipboards in their hands waiting next to a school bus.

"Good morning," the girl greeted us, her shiny black ponytail swinging as she spoke. "You're here for the A7 single overnight? I'm Rebecca Chu, and I'm leading the hike with Isaac Feldman." Isaac was tall and rangy and grinned at us in acknowledgement; I could just barely see the embroidered cap nestled in his thick dark curls.

"We're still debating the weather," Rebecca went on, looking up at the thickly clouded sky. The air was warm, though cooler than New York.

The family meteorologist gazed upward and said with total assurance, "It's not going to rain. I can feel it in my bones." _Too bad,_ I thought to myself.

Rebecca appeared instantly convinced by Alice's forecast, as she should. "You're probably right," she said, then glanced at the equipment Edward was carrying and shook her head. "You don't need a tent. There are shelters at the campsite."

"My wife and I are not sleeping in a shelter," Edward said firmly.

"Oh," she said faintly, and looked at her clipboard. "You must be Edward Cullen and ..." She looked between Alice and me, confused.

"I'm Bella," I said quietly, understanding her bewilderment; Alice looked more likely as a partner for Edward than I did. "Alice is Edward's sister."

"Right," she said a little doubtfully. "Sorry, we haven't had a married couple on the hike before. Do you know how to set up the tent?"

"Absolutely," Edward assured her. "I'll be able to get it up in no time." Alice didn't quite suppress her snort; she was definitely still a bit peeved about the closet. I certainly was looking forward to being able to kick my siblings in the shins one day and have it mean something. Rebecca, fortunately, didn't seem to notice and instead told us where to stow the tent and the rest of our extra gear in the bus.

She and Isaac conferred for a bit and agreed that it was worth chancing the weather, then had us all get on the bus, which took us north for about an hour into the White Mountains and let us off at a trailhead. We all carried light knapsacks with water, lunches and towels and swimsuits and left our heavier equipment on the bus, which would meet us at the campsite – this was the wussy hike for Bella, as Alice pointed out.

Alice, at least, behaved once we were on the trail, chatting up Rebecca and Isaac and the 20 or so freshmen on this hike, which took us ever upward, along streams and cascading waterfalls that were the loudest sounds in the strangely quiet forest besides us. But Edward quickly grew bored with the pace and pulled me off the trail whenever possible, finding the thickest, smoothest birches to support me as we grappled with each other feverishly and with ever increasing frustration – well, one time we found a rock ledge that was the perfect height for our version of food sex – until he had to race me back to join the others before our absence became too noticeable.

We stopped for lunch at a decaying set of wooden picnic tables, and Rebecca and Isaac promoted the outing club and talked about the geological history of the White Mountains and the trees and animals: bobcats, black bears, coyotes, moose, salamanders, Lyme-disease-carrying ticks.

"Normally, we'd see a good number of deer along here, and hear the moose, because it's their mating season, but I guess today's not our day," Isaac said. I stared intently at my Dartmouth-provided apple, while Alice and Edward listened with polite interest, tearing their sandwiches into little pieces as if they weren't the cause for the silent forest. Butter really wouldn't melt in their mouths, I thought with a sudden smirk that earned me a raised eyebrow from my husband.

By late afternoon, we'd arrived at a clearing with two shelters along a beautiful clear lake otherwise surrounded by woods. The western sun chose that moment to shoot rays through a break in the clouds, causing Edward to pull me back into shade. I knew the plan was for us to swim and then camp here for the night. Damn, I thought, I guess I'll be swimming alone. Our fellow hikers streamed toward the shelters to change, girls in one, guys in the other. Alice was nowhere to be found. I wondered if she had already gone to meet Jasper.

"This may be less enjoyable than I'd hoped," Edward murmured in my ear.

"I'll say. I was looking forward to seeing you in your swimsuit," I said regretfully.

"But I'll still be hearing the boys see you in yours," he said. An edge came into his voice at "boys."

"Didn't your mother ever tell you that jealousy was unattractive?"

"She may well have. Are you finding me unattractive?" The corner of his mouth curved up with his mood.

"Uh, no. And you know that very well. … Umm, so what should we do?" It might look odd if we all avoided swimming after a should-have-been-sweaty hike.

Edward surveyed the woods around the lake, and his face cleared. "Swim out to the left, around that copse of pines –" he pointed to the trees he meant – "and you'll find a little cove with plenty of shade. And me."

He glanced at the sky again, then took his board shorts out of his knapsack before handing it to me. "Hold onto that for me, and go change," he said, and swatted me gently on the bottom. He melted into the forest, and I walked to the girls' shelter.

I stripped off my clothes amid the giggles and complaining predictions of the other freshmen that the water would be freezing – the lake, Rebecca told us, was once a mica mine and was cold and deep - and searched my backpack for the modest one-piece I'd packed. But what I found was a red bikini with a bottom that tied on the sides, one I recognized from my honeymoon that I'd never gotten around to wearing. _Alice._ I hadn't realized that this suit had even made the trip to Hanover. I put it on, covering it with a zippered long-sleeved top that was supposed to keep me relatively warm. There was no mirror in the shelter, and I was afraid that the result was more Bond girl than I would have chosen. I also knew I was getting the once-over from the other women, who no doubt were puzzled why I was hanging out with someone who looked like Edward. Maybe I should strap a dagger to my thigh…

I stepped outside and dropped Edward's knapsack at the foot of a tree near the water, and hung his towel and mine on one of its branches, a gesture that reminded me of my first night on the island. The ocean there had been delightfully warm, heavenly, caressing …. I sat on the rock edge of the lake and steeled myself for the shock of slipping in.

_Cold, cold, cold_, I chanted in time with my strokes, but eventually I adjusted and felt pretty comfortable by the time I'd made it to the cove. This was the most exercise I'd gotten all day, what with Edward carrying me most of the way. The lake was much shallower in the cove, and black rocks were jumbled below my feet, reminders of the mine that had operated here. I could also hear the other swimmers splashing and squealing, but I couldn't see any, so I felt confident that my graceless treading was unobserved.

That was a foolish thought, for Edward had to catch my bark of surprise with his hand when he materialized in front of me, shooting up from under the surface. His lips replaced his hand, then he said, "I owe you one," before sliding back down under the water. My confusion lasted only until he untied one side of my bikini bottoms and pushed them aside. Oh my God, we couldn't, could we?

Apparently we could. He maneuvered my legs over his shoulders and pulled me closer to him, and now his lake-cold mouth was on me, the same temperature as the water around us, and his arms were bars caging my bottom and my back. His stone weight allowed him to stand on a submerged rock and pull me down until the water was just below my shoulders.

I was helpless to do anything but feel where our skin touched and clutch his hair and remember that I didn't want to inspire my classmates. My teeth clenched, but I couldn't stop the whimper in my throat as his tongue pressed against my flesh and my heels pressed against his unyielding back. After a day of groping, it was a mercifully quick release that left me on the verge of collapse.

Edward looked very pleased with himself when he resurfaced and saw my dazed expression. He glided us to a higher rock where I was able to stand, turned me around and hooked his arm around my hips so he could retie my swimsuit.

"My little naiad, should we head back?" he said, a tease in his voice, his chin weighing lightly on my shoulder. "Or should we do that again?"

I had to take a minute more to gather my wits, sort of. "We should … we should head back," I stuttered, starting to shiver. "I mean, we should do that again, but not here … Jeez." I took a breath and looked up at the sky to see that the sun seemed to have disappeared definitively behind the clouds, then turned to look at him. "I feel it incumbent on me to note that I owe you many more than you owe me."

"You have time to make it up to me."

We swam back to the campsite together, I paddling doggedly, he stroking occasionally, seeming to power himself almost purely by his legs. We reached the shore, and he boosted me up to sit on the rock edge, and with a litheness that was just this side of inhuman he pulled himself out of the water.

I grabbed my towel from the tree and covered myself as hastily as I could, feeling rather than seeing the many eyes on us. As it was, I probably looked debauched - and if there were a male version of a water nymph, it would be Edward, drying himself off, shaking water from his hair.

I was caught by an access of shivers as I watched him; that water really was freezing. I drew my towel tighter around myself, and Edward wrapped his securely around me too before drawing me to him as my body shuddered violently. But his arms eventually calmed me, and I put my hand on his face, his skin a paler contrast to my own pale skin.

"You're too sexy for your board shorts," I murmured to him, still feeling the weight of attention. "You'd better change before someone passes out."

We all had to help make the fire and cook dinner, but Edward took the opportunity to avoid eating it by going off to retrieve his clothes and set up our tent, which had been dropped off by the bus. He was soon joined at the other end of the clearing by Isaac, who apparently thought he should help, not realizing that he was forcing Edward to slow down. Rebecca came over to sit next to me, and I could see her glancing at the two men occasionally as we talked and she gave me advice about which classes to take and what professors to avoid. She was pre-med, like Rosalie this time.

"How long have you two been married?" she eventually asked, and I suspected that this was the real aim of her conversation.

"A little more than a month," I answered, though even as I said it I wondered if I should somehow be vaguer. This was the first time since the wedding for me to talk to someone about my life who wasn't my family. Maybe I should start practicing my lying since I was so bad at it.

"Hmm, Isaac and I have been talking about it… perhaps when we graduate this year."

"Oh, I was wondering about that – you're pretty discreet," I said, thinking how difficult it was for Edward and me to keep from touching each other; we were probably rather sickening sometimes. "It must be destiny, considering your names."

"Yeah, though, we" - she shot another look at the tent, which must have been all done, since Edward and Isaac were headed toward us – "are sleeping in separate shelters. Do you camp a lot? Your guy seems very comfortable with setting up the tent."

"He is good with his hands," I said demurely.

"Didn't your families think you were too young to get married? Ours certainly do. And my family's not thrilled at the idea of me converting."

Mine probably wouldn't be thrilled if they knew about my imminent conversion, either, I couldn't help but think. "Yeah," I answered Rebecca's question, ignoring the other issues. "I mean, _I _thought I was too young, not just my family. But," I gave her a smile, "it's the best decision I've ever made."

"What decision was that?" Edward asked, coming to sit down beside me, as if he hadn't heard our entire conversation. He had thoughtfully put on a fleece pullover to make it easier for me to lean against him.

"My decision to wear these hiking boots," I said, looking up at him and wiggling my feet. Rebecca laughed. "They're so good that I feel as if I hardly walked at all today." This time it was Edward who laughed.

Rebecca looked quizzical as she excused herself and returned to her seat on the other side of the fire, Isaac joining her. She clapped her hands to get the attention of all the hikers. "I want to make sure that everyone knows who everyone else is, so let's go around the circle and introduce ourselves, where you're from, what you want to study, what you did this summer, and hmmm, say one thing we wouldn't expect about you," she announced.

Well, crap, this was going to be humiliating, I thought, and looked at Edward in a panic; beyond him, I could now see Alice, who had timed her return from Jasper to miss dinner. My heart dropped as the extremely skinny guy sitting next to Rebecca began his autobiography by mentioning his Intel prize.

My classmates knew how to package themselves for college admissions officers: internships at Cadwalader, Whiteshoe & Taft or the Heritage Foundation or Knopf; winter breaks spent building cement-block houses in Guatemala; stints working on ribosomes with Nobel laureates at Rockefeller University. They had astonishing names and went to boarding schools: there was a girl named Melville from Miss Porter's and a boy named Phillips from Phillips Andover. We had a national junior tennis champion and several black belts. They had their academic careers all mapped out because they knew that they wanted to be doctors or lawyers or research scientists or investment bankers.

And I was going to say what, precisely? _My name's Bella and I come from a town with the highest concentration of supernatural beings per capita in the U.S. I spent a lot of the last few months being stalked by an angry vampire whose mate my husband's family killed. On my first trip abroad, I met the vampire mafia, which decided to impose a literal deadline on me. Some of my best friends turn into wolves who fall helplessly in love with toddlers - yeah, ugh, right? My big goal in life is to give that life up so I can be forever with the ethereal man next to me who finds that I smell really, really good – so good that he wanted to drain me when he met me._

_And I couldn't care less about a major because the chance that I'll be graduating with you guys in four years? Zero._

The only thing to recommend it was its truthfulness.

While I was hoping in vain that there would be at least one feckless child of an alum in the group so I wouldn't be alone in my lack of mentionable extracurriculars, show-and-tell arrived next to me. My neighbor to my left was a blond, pink-cheeked girl named Krissy who, it turned out, was exactly as she appeared, the home-schooled daughter of Iowa farmers who happened to have made it to third place at the national spelling bee when she was 13.

"But I have to confess that my proudest accomplishment that year was that my pig Wilbur took first prize in the junior farmers' competition at the state fair," she concluded.

"Some pig," Rebecca called out.

"E.B. White was obviously a city boy," Krissy replied. "Wilbur made excellent bacon."

A small, shocked silence greeted her words, and now it was my turn. I looked at Edward in alarm and he smiled. "Just say what's appropriate for polite company," he whispered in my ear. "You'll be fine."

No, I was going to be the obvious charity case. No, that wasn't right. I was going to be the one who bribed her way in.

"Next," Rebecca said encouragingly.

"Um, my name's Bella and I come from a small town in Washington that's probably the wettest place in the continental U.S.," I started, my voice cracking a bit. "My dad's the police chief there … I, ah, am not sure what I want to do after college, but maybe I'll major in English lit. This summer I visited Brazil, which -" _I barely saw _"- was really beautiful," I paused, feeling Edward's arm tightening around me but also seeing the dubious looks on the faces around the fire. "And the thing that most surprises me about myself," I rushed on, "is that I'm married."

There were a few audible gasps, but Edward made the segue seamlessly. "And my name is Edward. I'm from the same little town as Bella. I plan to major in Russian studies and I hope to work for the State Department or an NGO. Everyone is focusing on China and Muslim countries and so we're neglecting Russia at our peril, I believe. I've written some articles for the Council on Foreign Relations on the subject." Oh, yes, the fire circle was fascinated, I could see. He was such a fabulous liar. "As Bella said, Brazil was really _beautiful_," he said, his voice becoming impossibly smoother, making me sag against him a little.

"And the thing that I continually find most surprising about my life is that Bella agreed to marry me," he finished, to a chorus of "Awwwwww."

"Anyone who didn't have a crush on you before has one now," I whispered waspishly, but Edward just kissed me, eliciting another round of "Awwwwww."

It was the next vampire's turn."Hi, I'm Alice," she started enthusiastically and with inflections that screamed "teenager." I had to admire that. "I'm from the Olympic Peninsula, like Edward and Bella, and this summer I had a really awesome experience. A group of real estate developers from Seattle and Italy wanted to buy up land that's essential for the habitat of the Olympic wolf, and I organized a campaign to stop them –"

"It's good that there are no forestry students here - the Olympic wolf is extinct," Edward muttered to me.

"—and Edward and Bella helped, but they're too modest to say, but we were able to stop their plans, or least delay them until they do an environmental impact statement. And of course my mother's a lawyer and she did all the technical stuff –"

"Esme's a lawyer?" I asked, sotto voce.

"Yale Class of '72, but she can't be admitted to the bar – she doesn't have the necessary good character." I almost felt offended, since Esme had a great character, then I realized something.

"Esme went to law school with the Clintons?" He nodded. "Did Bill hit on her?" He nodded again briefly, deeming that of little importance, but I fleetingly wondered if Esme had rebuffed the future president with a devastatingly sympathetic smile, or if she'd given him a lethal glare that would have made his testicles retract.

"Shh, listen to Alice," Edward urged me.

"- so I'm thinking I'd like to be a lawyer too. And I'm really excited to be here and join my husband, Jasper, at Dartmouth."

Oh, crap. Again there was palpable surprise and murmurs as Alice smiled serenely.

As the next camper started her spiel, I turned to Edward. "Are we _all _married?" I asked.

"Mmm-huh."

"We sound like we're in some cult. The Marry at 18 Church? Abstinence Anonymous? Fundamentalist Mormons?" I could hear a soft giggle from Alice.

"It's a relief not to have to pretend that we're not married," Edward said reprovingly. "And do you want to live in a dorm? It's mandatory here." I shook my head vigorously. "This is the price you have to pay, Sister Bella."

Finally, the last freshman spoke, and Rebecca and Isaac suggested we get ready for bed, repeating their earlier warnings about Lyme disease. Everyone started shuffling off toward the shelters, even Alice, who gave us a cheerful goodnight. She'd wait until everyone who slept was asleep before sneaking out to meet Jasper again.

Edward took my wrist and pulled me toward the tent. "Come on, I'm going to inspect you for ticks," he said.

"Not with those hands, you aren't," I said sadly, contemplating the fact for the first time since my wedding I was going to wear pajamas to bed.

"Truly? Because I had an idea." _Oh, really?_

"I'm all ears."

There was a small lantern for my benefit in the tent, so I could see that he had zipped together our sleeping bags. Which looked lumpier than Edward would ever be responsible for.

"What is this?" I asked, waving toward the bags.

"My idea. It's an experiment – "

"And what's my role, professor?"

For answer he did one of his patented tackles, rolling us both across the breadth of the fabric and back as I giggled. The lumps weren't hard, but almost squishy, moving under my back. When we stopped, I reached into the bags to confirm my suspicion.

"Handwarmers!" I said, pulling out a couple of small rectangular packages. "You carried dozens of these here?"

"Just two dozen. What do you think?"

"I think we have to test your hypothesis," I answered, and tilted my face up so I could bite his earlobe carefully and make him make a sound.

It turned out that Professor Cullen's experiment wasn't a total success. The gel packs were too hot for my bare skin, and could warm up only patches of his, so there ensued a great deal of muffled laughing and squealing. But they did fulfill their promise of warming hands, which he used to great effect. He was able to prove, to his satisfaction and mine, that there was only one bloodsucker in our sleeping bag.

* * *

The next day, after another bus ride and a short, chaste hike on Mount Moosilauke, we met other groups of freshmen at the lodge the college owned, and learned the alma mater and the fight song - as well as enough about Dartmouth traditions for me to feel it necessary to reiterate my no-streaking policy. In the rest of Orientation Week that followed, we sat through a speech by the president and went to a reading by the Jamaican novelist who was the star of the English department. Edward charmed his way into Professor Yefimov's advanced Russian literature class, and I tried to evade my adviser's efforts to get me to sign up for a foreign language and one of the required P.E. courses. I had no problem shutting her up after I stunned her by explaining why I didn't live in a dorm.

That last circumstance meant there was a lot of orientation I didn't experience, I could see from the sheet in my packet listing the week's official activities, many of them revolving around one's residence hall. I could also picture the unofficial activities: drinking with dorm mates from a smuggled bottle of vodka that the RA pretended not to notice; venturing out to the parties that spilled out of the frat houses and dorms; sharing complaints with suitemates about the residence hall food or our registration times; late-night confessions about high school boyfriends left behind and cute senior guys. Or at least so I imagined, having experienced a little bit of these rituals of friendships in my pre-Edward life. The way we lived would always keep us on the periphery, and I wasn't sure that the other Cullens realized what they were missing, having always been in college as outsiders.

But we had our own activities. We retrieved my armored car in White River Junction. We picked up our mail at the post office in Hanover, including a discreet brown package filled with little plastic bottles. We also went to the siblings' stone folly of a house and watched Jasper hack into the registration system so we could get into classes with good locations and no Friday afternoon sessions, Edward muttering that we had to be able to catch a good flight out of Lebanon to Boston.

Jasper could tell I felt guilty about it, and he wasn't having it.

"If we were in wheelchairs, would you feel that we didn't deserve priority for classes in buildings with ramps?" he asked rhetorically. "Of course not. We're handicapped, too, and deserve to get into classes we can attend most of the time. "

"Handicapped by sparkles?"

"You wait – you won't be laughing one day," he said, but he was stifling a grin.

I went to my first college football game (well, just the first half, since we knew the sun would appear in the third quarter and the seats for students at Memorial Field weren't covered), which, meeting all expectations and no doubt to Charlie's perverse satisfaction, Dartmouth lost soundly. Emmett nonetheless displayed an inordinate level of enthusiasm as we sat in the stands, his muscles straining at the fabric of his forest green Dartmouth sweatshirt, until Alice warned him that if he didn't pipe down, the coach would try to recruit him as a walk-on. Emmett looked wistful at the idea, but limited himself to quiet muttering from then on.

Maybe when they got home, he and Rosalie would play football captain and cheerleader. Hmmm, that really didn't suit her personality, I thought. Maybe she'd be the quarterback and he'd be the defensive tackle trying to sack her. I couldn't help but snort a little, then shook my head when Edward looked at me – even he would groan at me for that.

Finally, the first day of classes arrived, and it was inconveniently sunny. Fortunately, Jasper had through forgery or other means obtained stickers that allowed us to park pretty much anywhere, including the covered loading dock in the back of the blocky '60s building that was the site of our first class, art history. We walked up to the auditorium-style lecture hall and found seats that had a good view of the screen pulled down over the white board in front.

The room rapidly filled, and I looked at my classmates, most of them dressed as unremarkably as I, in sweatpants or jeans and hoodies, whether they were girls with the shiny, glossy hair of boarding school alumnae or bearded students from Dubai, appearing alternately excited (the freshmen) or sleepy (everyone else), and realized that there was nothing about me that screamed, "Got in through bribery." It wasn't all hoodies, though: there were a few Williamsburg clones, an anachronism in a Mohawk, and Krissy from the hike in a 4-H T-shirt decorated with an incongruously smiling pig. She waved to me.

I turned to Edward, who was watching me closely, seemingly oblivious to the bursts of lust and admiration directed his way, the awed stares of each newly arrived student.

"Any last words of advice before I start my college career, O multiple matriculate?" I asked.

He looked at me a moment, his head tilted as if he was listening to something. "Don't tell anyone your maiden name," he finally said.

Huh? Just then the lights dimmed and a slide of the Lascaux cave drawings appeared on the screen in front. The professor began his lecture, and I forgot what Edward said because that damned, glorious tension between us that always arose when we were in these circumstances was back. I groaned softly. Edward took my left hand in his right, not bothering to pretend to need to take notes, and I leaned against his arm until I was finally able to relax enough to concentrate on the bison outlines.

That day, a collection of large boxes arrived at our house, and Edward confessed that he'd ordered a sauna kit in Forks after I'd mentioned it. Everyone came over on a sunny day to set it up, with Alice as the construction chief in Esme's absence. I felt more superfluous than normal, not needed even to supply beers or make sandwiches for the laborers. Instead, I went to class in my armored car and came back, wrote to Charlie and Renee, started rereading "Mansfield Park" for English lit, and watched Jasper and Rosalie juggle the stones for the sauna stove in the back.

Everyone knew that Edward and I wouldn't be sweating out impurities in our new sauna, but nobody said anything, not even Emmett. The closest anyone got was when I thanked Rosalie, and she shrugged.

"Anything to help Edward get laid," she said, granting me one of her rare nice-Rosalie moments, which in the spectrum of niceness was pretty far over to the left.

* * *

It was a new kind of torture being in college with Edward, one I hadn't really anticipated. Back in Forks, my classmates had given up their hopes of attracting his attention by the time I'd arrived, having either experienced his indifference or slowly understood that there was something not quite … safe about him. But here he was just an extraordinarily handsome newcomer, his menace tamped down by his happiness and my presence, and even his ring didn't register among a population that quite reasonably was unused to people our age being married.

I soon had a striking demonstration of this new reality. Psychology, my last class of the day, had ended, and I was putting away my books slowly as the classroom emptied, selfishly dawdling until I could be certain that Edward had had time to walk at a human pace from Carpenter Hall and would be outside the building waiting for me. The thought that he was waiting, for me alone, made my heart swell. He would always wait for me, I thought, though there was a little part of me still not entirely convinced of this, a part that would be eradicated only when I was like him.

Finally, all who were left were the professor, surrounded by a handful of students asking questions, and a pair of girls in short plaid skirts and boots standing by the windows. One was recounting an incident from a party the night before when the other interrupted her to exclaim, "My God, Ridgely, look at that gorgeous guy with the sex hair down there on the path." Ridgely obediently turned her gaze to the window, and I saw her mouth falling into an oval.

"How beautiful," she murmured, seemingly transfixed. Oh, I could imagine just how beautiful. I moved from my desk over to another window and looked down. Edward was there in dark jeans that fit perfectly and a long-sleeved green T-shirt that emphasized the lean muscle of his never-quite-a-grown-man's torso. My mouth made its own little oval, and as I pressed my forehead to the glass, his exquisite, intelligent face turned to mine, his eyes attracted by the movement.

"I wonder what dorm he's in," Ridgely went on. "We could stalk him and find out." Her friend giggled and nodded, and in silent accord they headed for the door.

No, you won't, I thought ferociously, and a wave of trembling anger jolted me into action. With a speed and a measure of agility I didn't know I possessed, I grabbed my bag, brushed past the pair and flew down the stairs, making the taped-up fliers announcing meetings and auditions flutter behind me on the landings. Edward had already moved and was by the main door when I ran out and toward him. His hands adroitly grabbed my waist, preventing me from slamming into his chest and instead pulling me to him gently, his solid arms folding around my back. The sense of relief was familiar and instant.

"I'm glad to see you, too," he said, smiling down at me. "Was psychology particularly irksome today?" he added as I clutched him as tightly as I could.

"I'm just feeling possessive at the moment," I mumbled into his shirt.

"Didn't your mother tell you jealousy was unattractive?" he asked, and lifted his eyes to look over my head. I turned to see Ridgely and her friend Choate or whoever, staring at us from the steps of the building, the thoughts he was hearing obvious on their faces.

"They wanted to be your obsessive stalker, and that position is filled," I said quietly, fiercely, with all the Bella-possessiveness I had. I reached up and ran my nails along his scalp. "They said you had sex hair. That's _my _sex hair." There was a rumble in his chest, whether at my words or the movement of my fingers, and I felt an overwhelming hunger for him, for my husband. _My mate._ He shuddered under my hands. He felt it too.

"I'm finding your jealousy intensely attractive," he whispered, his voice husky. "I set the timer on the sauna before we left today. And if we don't go home now, I'm going to tear your clothes off here on the Green."

My legs felt weak under me as he pulled me across the grass and toward the car, our audience forgotten. I put on my seatbelt, but I couldn't keep my hands off him, twining my fingers in the hair at his neck, dipping them under his collar to feel the cool skin of his back, under the hem of his shirt to touch his stomach. The gravel of the driveway to our house flew out from under our wheels.

We still had to wait, of course, even though the sauna stove was humming. He went straight to the bathroom, tore off his clothes and stepped into the heat; I fetched towels and a thick cotton blanket from the linen closet and undressed unhurriedly as I could, waiting for him, the uncomfortable flare of possessiveness transforming into pure, liquid desire. I wrapped myself in one of the towels and dropped the rest in front of the sauna, noting in passing the ruined pair of boxer briefs that I'd never get to slide down his legs. I stared at him inside, his bare skin reddened by the lights, and put my palm on the narrow glass panel of the door. He copied the gesture. It was like visiting day at a prison, each of us trapped by our bodies.

Much too depressing an image, I thought. I put my lips on the glass then, and made a wet kissing sound that I knew he could hear. He laughed and opened the door slowly enough that I wouldn't fall over, and guided me over the doorsill, watching my face.

The sauna wasn't at its highest temperature, but when I touched him, he was ready. "Yes," I said, smiling up at him, so he wouldn't have to ask. He wrapped me in his arms immediately, my towel dropping away, his erection pushing against my abdomen for an instant before he bent his knees to allow him to bury his face in the curve of my neck. I moaned as my shoulder blades pressed into the warm wood of the wall, and I felt his tongue set fire to my skin. He pulled my hips forward a bit and gently slid one of his knees between mine, separating my legs so his thigh could rub against my sex. I knew he could stand this way indefinitely, his hard length nestled against my hipbone. Mmmm, my strong, flexible man….

This was a much more efficient version of our bungalow-furnace on the Plains, and I was quickly covered in sweat. A drop trickled between my breasts and his tongue pursued it. There was another drop, and another chase, and I couldn't stop myself from pushing harder against the muscles of his thigh.

"Umm, Edward … don't I taste unpleasantly salty now?" I mumbled.

A low growl vibrated against my skin. "Baby, you always taste fantastic," he said, his lips not detaching themselves from my body. "And right now you taste fucking fantastic. I will lick every bead of sweat off you if you'll let me. Your sweat is my version of caviar … your tears, your wetness – they're phenomenal." He hesitated, and drew in a breath, then continued. "And … blood is salty. I _definitely _don't mind it." I shuddered against him at his words, and he finally lifted his head and examined my flushed face.

"Want to sit down?" he asked, and I nodded. He and Alice had modified the kit, and instead of the pair of narrow benches lining the sauna walls called for in the plans, they'd built a bed-sized platform. He carried me to it and set me down, then flew out of the sauna to retrieve the towels I'd left. A gust of cooler air followed him back in.

"Do you need to take a break?" he asked when he returned. It was just like a hot day in Arizona, and I shook my head. I helped him spread the blanket and towels on the platform, then sat down again, leaning back on my elbows, closing my eyes and imagining myself lounging under the sun in Phoenix, or better yet, on a blanket on the sand on the island ... his body wet from swimming, coming to loom over me, his ocean-warm skin pressing against mine, his voice soothing and seductive in my ear, the blanket disintegrating in his hands. He was looming over me now, I realized, his palm cupping my bent knee. I pretended not to notice, instead lazily stretching my arms over my head, arching above the cool, thick towels protecting my back from the hardness and heat of the wood.

I heard a sharp inhale and opened my eyes to find Edward staring at me and looking ravenous, his skin glowing, his body hard. My own breath left my lungs in a loud moan at the sight of his want. I beckoned to him then, and he descended immediately between my open legs, his stone body slipping on my wet skin, his tongue on the dip of my collarbones, the outside curve of my breast, the slick inside of my elbow.

He didn't ask me to guide him this time. Instead, he moved in me with exquisite slowness, murmuring for me to stay still and not exert myself. He grasped my bottom and moved his hand around and up the back of my right thigh, pushing it to my shoulder and holding it in place with his own shoulder, his hand propping up his body.

"Experimenting?" I breathed, unsure that this was a position I could maintain, even as warmed up as I was. He was far more flexible than I.

"Always," he purred.

I couldn't argue with that, for his right thumb had started stroking me. My body was overwhelmed by the different movements, one for his climax, one for mine, my climax drawing his, his climax prolonging mine. I lay beneath him, boneless and panting; he was motionless above me, then seemed to rouse himself and released my leg, easing it back down and moving himself out at the same time.

"Dear Abby, I've just had my brains fucked out by my vampire husband in a sauna. What should I do now? Signed, Newlywed in New Hampshire," I said as he lay down next to me, and giggled deliriously.

"Bella?" To my surprise, he wasn't smiling. I closed my eyes to try to figure out why.

To the accompaniment of a stream of profanities, I was yanked up off the towels and carried out of the sauna in a rush. Next I knew I was under the shower, the water cool on my skin, and Edward holding me upright.

"Bella?" he asked again as I thought regretfully of the heat he was losing. "Say something, please, baby."

"Okay – is something wrong?" I looked at him through the water trickling down my face.

"You were close to having a heat stroke, I think," he said. "I'm so sorry. I don't know why I didn't notice it sooner. You didn't seem overheated, and your heart rate seemed, well, normal for you."

He turned off the water and dried me off, then lifted me to his chest and carried me to our bed. He pulled the covers away, placed me on the mattress and stretched out beside me.

"I don't think I was having a heat stroke," I said.

"Would you know? Have you ever had one before?" he asked.

"No. Have you?"

Edward rubbed his forehead, not bothering to scoff at my ridiculous question. "Despite my youthful appearance, I have been to medical school. My training would lead me to believe that having sex in a sauna with an oblivous cold-blooded husband might cause heat stroke." He sounded frustrated and annoyed.

This was not an argument that either of us would win, I thought. I sighed dramatically.

"Yes?" he asked.

"I'm sad all your heat got washed away."

He rolled to his side, facing me, and drew a line down my sternum with his finger, and my breathing quickened. He gave me a small smile, giving me hope that I'd distracted him. "I'm sad that all your sweat got washed away," he said.

"That shows that you're definitely not human."

"To the contrary, that shows how human I am. I'm just not one of these modern boys brainwashed into thinking that women have to smell like industrial chemicals. You know what Napoleon wrote to Josephine when he was on his way home from battle?"

"Umm, no?"

"'Don't wash.'"

"I'm not sure you're not creeping me out."

He snorted. "I should have creeped you out a long time ago. You're beyond being creeped out. And if I sweated you'd do the same thing to me," he said confidently_. Yeah, I probably would. _But then, he'd taste a lot better than I did. He went on, "But I do apologize – I imagine I sounded a bit like an Erica Jong novel back there. Not that I would take any of it back."

"Who?"

"I'll let you wait to find out when you take a women's studies class."

Hmmm. I snickered at the thought of Edward in a women's studies class. Oh, wait. Edward and a few dozen college girls in a women's studies class.

"You took one?"

"Yes, in 1974."

"And?"

"It was enlightening."

"Really?"

He chuckled next to me. "Of course not. Bella, by that point I'd lived with Alice for a quarter-century, with Rosalie and Esme for much longer … and my mother was a suffragist at Bryn Mawr. How could I have had anything but utter respect for their intelligence, strength, skills? Besides, if I had been a sexist, Alice would have shoved me through a wall - Rosalie's done that to Emmett …"

Perhaps it was unfair of me, but I gave him a skeptical look. "There have been a lot of times when you seemed to feel that you knew a lot more than me, that you knew what was better for me than I did, " I pointed out. _Like about five minutes ago..._

He acknowledged that easily. "I did. I do," he said. "It's not because you're a woman. I've experienced a century of wildly contradictory views on women, enough to know that it's the individual who counts, not the gender. But in your case, I do that not because you're you, either. Your weaknesses aren't sex-specific, or even Bella-specific - though perhaps your danger magnet quality is uniquely yours. They're species-specific."

I considered for a moment my many human disadvantages, the aspects of my existence that worried Edward, the ones that made him flagellate himself for being with me. By now, I had cooled off enough that I felt the need to pull the sheets over me. They were warm; he'd apparently switched on the blanket without my noticing. In that case… I pulled them up over Edward as well.

"So why did you take the class?" I finally asked.

"It was Jasper's joke when he was doing the registrations. He enjoyed thinking that I'd be intensely uncomfortable as the only man in a class full of women with rather justified resentments toward the male sex – "

"Or maybe that you'd be constantly hit on as the only man in a class full of women –"

"I think you're operating under a misapprehension about the state of gender relations in the early '70s, at least in a women's studies class." He gave me a reassuring kiss on the shoulder, and I struggled to get my mind around the idea that there was a setting in which Edward _wouldn't_ have been hit on. "In any case, once the others saw I wasn't there to cause trouble, we got along just fine. I could quote Wollstonecraft with the best of them."

"How did you get your revenge on Jasper?" I asked, for I knew by now that there would have had to have been payback.

A look of satisfaction flitted across his face. "Black studies class," he said. "And the benefit was that afterward Jasper never attempted again to argue that the Civil War was all about states' rights, not slavery."

"That seems fitting," I agreed, and hummed a bit in contentment. It was so cozy lying here in the sheets, Edward getting warmer next to me. I had dinner to eat and a paper to do for remedial writing, but I couldn't make myself care.

"So … you mentioned sex-specific weaknesses before," I murmured, putting my hand on his chest. "Do you have any that you want to share with me?"

"Now that you mention it, I think I do have something that might need specially careful treatment," he answered silkily. "But I wouldn't want you to feel intimidated by the delicacy of your task."

"Oh, I think I can handle it," I said, moving my hand lower.

* * *

Not long after that, Feminist Edward and I also had one of the odder conversations any couple has had about household duties. We were in the kitchen, and I had just refused to let him wash the dishes I'd used for breakfast, saying that he shouldn't have to do everything.

"But it'll be much faster if I do it all," he noted.

After nearly a decade of household management, I felt strongly tempted to just give in. But I shook my head. I had to be able to do _something._

He sighed. "Bella, one day we'll do everything 50-50," he said. "You can chop wood for the fireplace and take over the stock portfolios if that's your inclination. But if I do it all now, you'll have more energy for your schoolwork, travel … and for other things we enjoy." He emphasized his last point by lifting my ponytail and kissing my neck.

God, that was an even better reason to accede, I thought, grabbing onto the counter to hold myself up. But I couldn't do it.

"Edward, you have to allow me my small competencies," I said, stepping away from him a little so I could keep track of my argument. "I'm helpless in so many ways around you: I need to have some reminder that I can do things for myself. Besides, I know you don't like handling food, and there are some things even you can't hurry along. You can't make the pancakes cook faster."

"True, but I can _make_ them faster."

"Aha! That's why your pancakes are tough - you mix them too hard," I teased him, and he momentarily fell for it, to my delight.

In the end, I ceded the cleaning to him, and we agreed to split the cooking. Edward being Edward, he cheated, cooking in quantities that guaranteed that there were always delicious leftovers I couldn't bear to let go to waste. I finally had to forbid him to make me breakfast, which had the side benefit of allowing me, every time I made pancakes, to moan histrionically as I ate them, praising their airiness as Edward rolled his eyes.

Karma got her revenge on me, though. My pancake habit had depleted our supply of flour, and Edward suggested that we drive to a big baking supply store just across the river. It was a gray Saturday, but gorgeous; as September turned into October, the Upper Valley had become more colorful, the red, orange and golds of the chestnuts and maples spreading up the hillsides until they met the green line of the pines.

As we drove, we talked about how close Salinger's house was to ours, just a few miles south in Cornish, and how "The Catcher in the Rye" seemed so alien and remote to me now, and so modern and true to Edward when it came out in 1951. Its stream-of-consciousness was restrained enough to not annoy the mind-reader, and Edward knew Holden Caulfield's New York well - the Biltmore clock, the movie palaces, the old Penn Station. Reading in my suburban Phoenix bedroom, however, I felt closer to Austen's Emma Woodhouse than to Salinger's prep-school jerk.

Edward decided to tease me by quoting from the book in a squeaky adolescent's voice: "I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn't any brains."

I blew him a raspberry, and settled back in my seat to watch the leaves. But my husband drew my eyes more than the foliage did. He had one hand resting on the steering wheel, the other cooling my thigh, yet still warming me. I knew if I leaned a little closer to him that I'd breathe in his wonderful scent. As we turned south on Route 5 in Norwich, I did just that.

His face had that expression of peace that it wore when only his thoughts were in his head, but when he turned to me he froze.

"What's wrong?" he asked, his voice alarmed, but I couldn't answer him. My body was shaking violently, uncontrollably, even though there was no reason for me to be cold. But what was truly frightening was that my mind was showing me images from the last few weeks – the subway platform in New York, the bathroom of the diner near White River Junction, the lake in the White Mountains, and, irony of ironies, psychology class. Crap, crap, _crap_. Oh, much more than crap.

The car stopped on the empty road. My door opened, my seatbelt vanished, and he was on his knees pulling me to him. "What's wrong?" he demanded again.

The arms around me eased my shaking, the closeness helped me breathe. _It always did._ "I don't know… It's nothing," I mumbled. "Stupid hyperventilating. I'm fine. Nothing's wrong."

I hoped I wasn't lying. But I knew that I was.

* * *

_A/N So – you guys seem to have a thing for hot tub sex, even incomplete hot tub sex. Hmmm…_

_Thanks to aliceg1967 for her rec on A Different Forest._

_Congratulations to spargelkun for figuring out that the chapter titles are airport and train station codes. And a big gold star to whoever can correctly identify the scene in this chapter that is the biggest piece of fantasy in my entire story._

_Thanks everyone for your words of encouragement. And my apologies to the Outing Club for taking creative license, and to our former president, who has never hit on anyone I know. _


	9. Chapter 9: LEB

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" doesn't belong to me._

* * *

Chapter 9: LEB

I knew how to spell "psychosomatic." It had been on my SAT vocabulary study guide, so I knew what it meant, too. And random unexplained shaking and dissociation had "psychosomatic" written all over it. Even as my tremors subsided at Edward's touch, I mentally surveyed my body. I felt great, physically: I was eating well; I was sleeping fantastically well, waking up feeling rested even after our nocturnal activities and eager for crepuscular ones; and if researchers wanted an example to illustrate their studies showing that regular orgasms were good for your well-being, they could just point to me.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Dear Abby would tell me that my vampire husband really _was _fucking my brains out.

Or maybe I should look up "panic attack" next time I was on a computer. Alone. Because the last thing I wanted was Edward worrying that after 18 months of attempted murder and cliff jumping and hallucinating that my vanished boyfriend was talking to me, I was finally falling apart. That it was too much for me to be with him.

It took a bit, but I was able to convince him that I was okay and that eventually someone would notice that he was kneeling next to me in the middle of Route 5. It helped that he was well aware of my inability to always breathe normally around him, and that I didn't have any lingering physical traces of the episode – no fever, no sweating, no dizziness, a regular heartbeat. He still glanced at me warily from time to time as we drove on to our destination.

And he hovered more than usual as we shopped, displaying a remarkable level of interest in all the flours and grains on display at the store, which was a big octagonal building with test kitchens, lots of out-of-towners, and, I automatically noticed, skylights. Inconvenient for people who needed to stay out of the sun. Of course, those sorts of people didn't normally need to spend time at King Arthur.

I started to pull a bag of organic white wheat flour from a shelf, but a hand on my wrist stopped me. "The sign says it's made from a strain of mutated wheat," Edward said. "Do you want to eat mutant wheat?"

I looked up at him with a smirk. "Well, you're a mutant and I –"

"Okay, okay, you don't have to continue," he said, laughing and putting a finger to my lips. They tingled under the brief touch. "In truth, you must eat a lot of mutated food, but it doesn't usually say so right on the package."

"It doesn't say so on your package, either."

He groaned and I stared at him, puzzled. He had to explain that one to me. Jeez, men had a lot of names for their penises, and I had an eternity to learn every one.

* * *

Our flour in the trunk, we headed toward Norwich proper and then north on the river road until we pulled over and parked near a big grassy field dotted with awnings and tables laden with apples and cheese and maple syrup and the other bounty of the Upper Valley. I supposed it was a very New England scene - the river on one side, the leaves on their last gasps around us, a gazebo in the middle, the smell of wood smoke in the air. There was a big local-food fetish here, with richer yuppie-ish types buying from poorer hippie-ish farmers, and that made this a very popular farmers' market.

As we picked our way through the crowd, I thought about mutants and blurted out, "Edward, do you think that we would have gotten together if you were … like me?"

"You mean apart from the fact that I'd either be dead or one of the last two surviving veterans of the Great War?" He stopped walking, and pulled me to him. He gazed down at me, a question in his eyes.

"Yeah, I mean –" I stopped, because this wasn't a great place for this conversation, and he suggested we go to the gazebo, which was unoccupied for the moment. We sat down on a wooden step and faced each other.

"I mean," I started again, looking down and playing with a button on my jacket, "that my silence and my scent wouldn't have mattered to you if you were human. You'd be you, smart, handsome and charming –" I flapped my hand, mimicking the gesture I'd made when we'd had a similar discussion in the high school cafeteria – "and I'd be me, offering no particular physical lure or promise of a mental refuge. We'd have no reason to be together." I winced at the neediness in my voice, the effect of the episode in the car.

He put his cool hand on my fidgeting one, and paused before he spoke, seeming to try to discern what was bothering me. "Bella, you've said it. We were meant to be together, whether that was intended by Fate, or ordained by God, or caused simply by a butterfly mindlessly fluttering its wings in the Amazon, or in an alternative universe where everyone is human," he said. "Fighting that is what has always put us in trouble."

"But what if it's not fate, but that you changed me?" I asked, then went on to describe my musings in the coffee shop near his childhood house, that he and the rest of his family exuded some hormone or chemical that transformed those with the right receptors. "Your presence changed the Quileutes," I said, and as I expected, this comment made him grimace. "Couldn't it have done something to me too?"

"I created my own singer? But, Bella, singers are so rare that I had existed a century without encountering a human who came anywhere close to having the allure you had for me. If we could create our own singers, surely they'd be much more common phenomena. Painfully short-lived ones."

I frowned, because I hadn't considered this in my self-absorption – my insecurities were nothing compared with the agony my blood had inflicted on him, and for me to suggest that he had done it himself…. "Well, not the singer part, but just that you find me attractive," I said. "Maybe that happened because I have some rare mutated gene or quirk in my biochemistry?" Edward looked pained at this, and I hurried on, "Not that I'm complaining, you know."

"It's curious how you always think there's something odd about you, when it is I who is the oddity," he said, stroking my cheek, then returning his hand to mine. "So let's say that here you are, with your unique mutation, living 80 years, a blink of eye in an eternity. The chances are that you will never meet a vampire, not just that you will never meet me. But you did. Or let's say that there are other people who happen to share your mutation, and I meet one of them, and involuntarily change her somehow so that she is attractive to me, but then of course I'll be able to hear her mind. I could spend millennia waiting for the right combination. That's why I believe in Fate. She made me wait less than a century."

"Maybe Fate decreed that I'd have a mutation that would make it happen?"

"Is this like intelligent design? Don't tell your evolutionary biology professor," he said. I laughed half-heartedly, and he went on, "Is something bothering you?"

"It's just, I'm so happy, and I'm so damn lucky, and I'm trying to figure it all out," I answered, probably sounding frustrated. I had to lie again, even if everything I was saying was true. "Why do we work together?"

"I'd say it's Fate."

"I'd say that a childhood of 19th-century novels turned you into a romantic, but it doesn't seem to have done that to me," I said.

I sighed and rubbed my hands up and down his thighs for the comfort of it, and then we got up to wander among the stalls. Edward stopped at a stand overseen by a woman with a long, gray braid under a floppy hat that didn't cast a shadow today. She was selling meat and yarn, and Edward asked her about the lamb chops.

"Just grill or broil them, not too long, and they'll be very tasty and juicy," she told him.

"I'm certain they will," he murmured, giving me a sly look before turning back to the farmer.

"Ow!" I said, but it wasn't in response to his stupid-lamb teasing. Edward spun around in a flash, but his face softened as he saw what was happening. A toddler in a baby sling had grabbed a hank of my hair and didn't seem inclined to let go.

"Beckett, stop!" the bearded man toting him said mechanically. He was nine or ten years older than I, and behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes looked incredibly weary. He reached over to disentangle his son's hand from my hair, but Edward got there first; his cold touch made the baby release instantly. The kid at least knew something about self-preservation.

"I'm sorry, his mother has long hair and he's fascinated with it," the man said. "Are you all right?" he asked me.

"Yeah," I said, stepping out of Beckett's reach. "Just surprised."

He accepted our wishes of good luck with a rueful laugh, and I watched him as he went on to join a woman shopping a few stands away with her hair prudently pulled back in a chignon. The baby reached his chubby hands toward her. I'd bet his parents never got to have sex any more.

Edward had completed his purchase and put his hand on the small of my back, his touch relaxing me automatically. When I looked at him, he was regarding the little family with a pensive expression.

"There are so many men you could have made happy, whom you could have been happy with, had a normal life with," he said softly. "But you are the only woman who could make me happy." He might believe Fate brought us together, but he still felt guilty about the sacrifices involved in following her dictates.

"No," I said, my voice determined. My truth might not be the same truth as Edward's, but it was just as valid. Renee had pooh-poohed the idea of one true love to me, understandably so. She loved Phil. She had loved Charlie, and while she shouldn't have married him, she wasn't going to ever say that it wasn't love. And I saw her point, because there were perhaps other men who would have made me content. Jacob might have made me happy. But it didn't matter now.

"Once I met you, I couldn't have been with anyone else. And I don't want a normal life and a kid named Beckett," I said. I smoothed my hair; it was sticky where the boy had grabbed it. "_Beckett._ Poor guy has to go through life with a name that says, I have pretentious parents. At least mine sound merely oblivious … Do you know what I'd name a kid?"

"What?"

He still looked too inclined to get emo on this whole Fate thing, and I narrowed my eyes at him. "B.J."

"For … Bella Junior?"

"For what you'd never get again if you knocked me up." He looked at me in mock horror then, and I giggled. Much better. "Come on, let's get some maple syrup for my _delicious_ pancakes."

* * *

"Dammit," Edward said the next morning, disentangling his legs from mine and rolling onto his back. "Emmett's arriving early."

"How soon?"

"I can hear him and Rosalie, so a couple of minutes. I'd better shower without you because Emmett's liable to break our door down." He kissed my throat, then blurred out of bed and into the bathroom. I scrambled out of the mauled Belgian linen sheets and into sweats and a T-shirt as quickly as I could before clomping to the kitchen to disengage the alarm and wait for our visitors.

Emmett wanted to get one or three of New Hampshire's many black bears before they went into hibernation, and Edward was going with him. Edward's eyes rarely darkened from gold now because his siblings were always asking him to hunt with them. It was because they missed him, and they missed him because we were living by ourselves for my benefit. I felt guilty about that, but only a little.

I unlocked the sliding glass door, then went to put the kettle on to boil in hopes of delaying Emmett's embrace. God only knew what he would say when he got a whiff of me.

When we were lying in bed earlier, I had told Edward my plans for the hours that he'd be away. While I hadn't had alone time with a computer, I'd noticed earlier that there was a yoga studio with Sunday morning classes in town. The yoga itself wasn't the draw, though I'd enjoyed the sessions I'd taken with Renee when she went through that phase; it was the half hour of meditation at the end that I wanted. I wanted to get a grip on myself.

Edward had been dubious, but I'd reassured him, "It's highly unlikely I'd get hurt – there are mats in case I fall out of my Tree, or something like that."

"You're going to be climbing a tree?" he asked. He looked so deliciously confused that I just had to kiss the corner of his mouth before I could explain it to him. Hah, something I knew more about than Edward - back in the day, I guess, elementary school kids weren't routinely doing Down Dog.

There was a thump at the door, and I murmured, "It's open, Em."

He and Rosalie breezed in, and Emmett was next to me instantly. I waved the boiling kettle toward him in faux menace and he backed off. But he still sniffed conspicuously, smiled wickedly … and said nothing. I gaped at him.

"Yes?" he asked.

"If I compliment you on your restraint, will I be sorry?"

His smile widened. "Probably."

"Well, then, it's very nice to see you both," I said sedately, nodding to Rosalie, and poured hot water into my mug.

Edward stepped into the kitchen then, his hair still damp, his legs hugged by well-worn jeans. I envied them. He and Emmett had a brief discussion of routes – hunting was more complicated here since the national forest was only a sixth of the size of the one that surrounded the Forks house – and it was time for them to be off.

Rosalie grabbed Emmett to say goodbye, and Edward wrapped his arms around me more gently. I reached up to pull his head down to mine, and even though I knew we had an audience, I whispered in his ear, "Remember, no circle jerks."

"I promise," he whispered back, and playfully darted his tongue in my ear, making me squeal and try to escape him. But he held me close, and moved his lips to mine, so that I could only vaguely hear Rosalie snort and Emmett yelp, "What the fuck have you been telling Bella – for Chrissakes, Edward!"

Edward ignored him. "Remember the alarms and your cell phone and that I love you," he told me. "And don't fall out of any trees."

My chest hurt as I watched him and Emmett disappear into the woods behind our house. I finally turned away and saw Rosalie's face; she looked as bereft as I felt. I had wondered why she was here, since, as Edward had explained to me, she couldn't go hunting with him and Emmett, and I realized that she had come to prolong her time with her husband. I felt the impulse to try to comfort her, to rub her shoulders in sympathy, but I refrained. It was probably when Rosalie felt the most vulnerable that she was the most likely to strike out.

Instead, I waved vaguely toward myself, and muttered, "Sorry."

I knew if I breathed in the skin of my arms that had been wound around Edward's back, or my collarbones stroked by his tongue, or my hands that had guided his hips into mine as we calibrated his thrusts, I would inhale his faint scent. In other words, by her standards, I reeked.

She shrugged. "Alice says you're doing yoga," she said. "Couldn't hurt."

It was my turn to shrug. I stared out the window at the sunless sky, Rosalie a statue next to me.

"I miss him," I said finally.

"So do I," she said, though she wasn't talking about Edward. She turned to me. "You should come to our house after your class. You don't have to be alone."

* * *

As I pulled into a parking spot on Main Street, I saw that somebody thought I shouldn't be in yoga alone either: Jasper was standing just outside the ice cream shop the yoga studio was above. The Cullens seemed to relax their conservative dress code in college, and Jasper was wearing a gray coat that looked as if it came from a Civil War re-enactment group's costumer by way of a Milan runway. He looked retro and modern at once.

"Hi," I greeted him. "Getting a sundae?"

He appeared sickened by the possibility for a moment, then gathered himself and said, "When she saw that you were coming here, Alice thought this would be a good idea for me, too … the meditation, that is."

"Didn't she want to come also?"

He stared at me in mild disbelief. "I wouldn't be able to focus if Alice were here bending and stretching in front of me …" he trailed off, and I knew he was imagining just that. I could suddenly picture Edward in class, his muscles smoothly rolling under cotton, doing a handstand and the hem of his shirt sliding down, revealing the lines of his torso – yeah, I wouldn't be able to concentrate either.

Jasper laughed softly next to me. "I'm sure you know exactly what I mean," he said.

"Um, yeah," I muttered. "We should go upstairs." As we climbed, I asked, "Have you done this before?"

"No, but I looked at some pictures."

We went to our respective changing rooms and met up again in the studio, a big room with windows overlooking the street and an orange and yellow yantra painted on one wall. We laid our mats down in the back of the classroom, I hoping not to distract the dozen or so other students with my gracelessness, Jasper hoping, I assume, not to distract them with his ... everything. He had covered himself up as much as he could, wearing gray sweatpants and a long-sleeved white T-shirt, but they couldn't hide the muscles of his shoulders and thighs. I noticed that I was able to make this observation as dispassionately as if I were assessing the proportions of one of the archaic Greek kouroi we were studying in art history.

That was more that you could say for the instructor, a woman in her 30s with a cloud of brown curls, a sylph-like body and a soothing voice. When she asked if any of us were absolute beginners, she looked hopefully at Jasper, but his hands stayed folded in his lap. And when she asked if any of us had anything in particular we needed to work on, I didn't mention that I was losing it.

Jasper in yoga was a thing of beauty, all straight lines and 90-degree angles and perfect curves, though I suspected he was rather remiss on the breathing part. The instructor was obviously longing to put her hands on him and adjust him, but couldn't see any excuse to do so. She was entranced watching him, and he shot me dirty looks occasionally at my smirking.

Apparently the next best thing to adjusting Jasper was adjusting me, and the teacher's attentions made this the best class I'd ever taken. It was both harder and easier than I expected: there were a lot more pushups that I remembered, but my balancing was much better – with Jasper nearby to steady me, I stayed in my Tree.

Jasper's calm also probably made this the most relaxed meditation session that this instructor had ever led. There was no fidgeting when we lay on our backs in the last pose, and when I chanced a look at Jasper, he was otherworldly in his stillness. When the teacher rang her Tibetan singing bowl and the humans all reluctantly pulled ourselves out of our trance states, she looked completely blissed out. I felt pretty good too.

"Jasper, yours was the best Corpse pose I've ever seen," I whispered to him as we made our way out of the classroom.

"Smartass."

I dressed and went downstairs to find Jasper back in his Confederate gray and waiting for me on the sidewalk. "I'm told you're coming over, but shall we go get some suitably post-yoga refreshment first?" he asked as I started to head for my car.

His question was so unexpected that I stopped in my tracks.

"Alice said it would be okay," he said, misinterpreting my astonishment.

"No, no, it's just – is a deer more yogically correct than a bear?" I asked.

Jasper smiled slightly. "I was thinking more along the lines of cardamom tea at that tearoom in the alley," he said.

"Oh, sure," I said, as we walked on and turned off Main Street, excited at this rare opportunity to spend time with Jasper. _Yep, I'm just hanging with the Civil War veteran ..._

"Jasper, did you own slaves?"

It was his turn to stop at my unexpected question and lift an eyebrow. I pointed at his coat. "You wear something like that, and a youngster is going to ask what you did in the war," I said.

"Fine, Sonny. Yes," he said shortly. He headed down the alley, and I ran a little to keep up.

"Really?"

"Houston was full of slaves, and there were even more slaves out in the country where we lived, on the farms."

Farm, my ass. "Jasper, your family had a plantation?"

"We had a cotton _farm,_ near the Brazos."

"Did you have a big white house like in 'Gone With the Wind'?"

He sighed. "I don't know what color it was. It was long gone by the time I had the inclination to try to find it again."

"You are so in trouble if a reparations law ever passes, Scarlett."

He shrugged. "I have many things in my existence to not be proud of, and that's one of them," he said. He made a noise of disgust as we neared the door of the tearoom, and as Jasper opened it for me, I figured out why.

"_I am a vampire,"_ the singer for the Blakes rasped on the speakers_. "I like it dead to rights because if you're dead in the light…"_

It was an odd choice of song for the tearoom, which was all peach walls, marble tables and those wrought-iron chairs that look more charming than practical. At least the music would muffle our conversation. We sat down at table for two in the back corner, away from the few other customers. It wasn't the sort of place for cardamom tea, so I ordered a pot of Earl Grey from a teenage waitress whose eyebrow ring might have helped explain the musical selection. Jasper did the same. As we waited for our drinks to arrive, the Blakes were succeeded by Concrete Blonde – "_There's a crack in the mirror and a bloodstain on the bed/Oh you were a vampire and baby I'm the walking dead"_ – and Jasper flinched.

"Halloween _is_ coming up," I noted. "What do you guys usually go as?"

"Jehovah's Witnesses," Jasper answered sourly. "Sensible people. They ignore Halloween."

I laughed. I hadn't really known what to expect, since I hadn't ever experienced Halloween with the Cullens - maybe that was their night to get out the capes. Now I knew.

"How was the class for you?" I asked him.

"Alice was right about it – I haven't been that at ease with humans since … well, ever. I found it very calming, like a virtuous cycle. The other students felt relaxed, and I felt relaxed, and I could send more relaxation their way … Even you seemed to relax after a while," he said pointedly. "Is something bothering you?"

Well, crap, he had noticed. I sighed and hoped that a partial confession would suffice. "No… but the last year or so of my life has been pretty intense—"

"I'll say."

"—and it's still pretty intense… intensely _happy,_ you know ... so many new things, but I have a bit of leisure at the moment to try to come to terms with it, you know, and I thought a little meditation would help center me, make me feel less like –" _like_ _I'm going to scare the hell out of Edward_ – "everything is rushing toward me. I need to spend a few minutes slowing down…" I trailed off.

He nodded. "Well, it's certainly not as if you can go to a wig picker for help," he said.

"Are you breaking out the Civil War slang there?"

"Hardly. A headshrinker, a bug doctor."

"Oh. True." I had realized this when Edward had left – and it was too bad I couldn't visit a psychiatrist, because some Xanax or something might be helpful if I was really hurtling toward having full-fledged panic attacks. The waitress returned with our teapots, and we fussed with them for a few minutes, Jasper asking me how I liked my tea and taking out the basket of leaves when I told him, "Medium, I guess." I mimicked him.

"And there are other reasons for yoga. Like flexibility," I went on, thinking back to my time with Edward in the sauna, my leg draped over his hard shoulder. Maybe I could do that when I wasn't covered in sweat if I practiced Happy Baby ….

"Earth to Bella," Jasper said with a laugh, knowing at least the subject of my thoughts. I blushed, finally noticing that the sugar tongs had been suspended over my teacup for an embarrassingly long time. It was unsettling to know my feelings were so exposed.

"Speaking of," he continued, "I'm delighted all that is working out for you and Edward. Though truth be told, I always thought that it would."

"Really?" I asked in surprise. I would have thought that of everyone, Jasper would have been the most pessimistic of my chances of surviving my honeymo - "Wait, you bet Emmett that I'd return from the island, didn't you?"

"And I won," he said, looking pleased with himself. "Although to be fair to Emmett – even though he hardly deserves it – it wasn't a serious bet on his part, only on mine."

"Why?"

His face became more serious, and he put his hands around his ceramic teapot as if to warm them. "I don't know what Edward has told you of my history…"

"Nothing," I hastened to assure him. "I really know only what you told me of the vampire wars." After all, Edward hadn't told me that Jasper was his source on human-vampire liaisons gone bad, I had merely guessed.

"You know that means it was reprehensible."

I nodded cautiously.

"I've been with a lot of women."

I took a sip of tea and waited.

"As I told you, my gift means that I felt the fear and horror of those who fed me. It crippled me, but I had no alternative, I thought. I did know, though, that some women found me attractive-"

"I'll say," I interjected, thinking of the yoga instructor.

"- and that my touch was pleasurable to them, in the beginning of our encounters, at least. I began to wonder if I could reduce their pain, and thus my own. I was not being a humanitarian; I simply wanted to avoid feeling their distress so acutely. It was completely selfish of me. I learned to seduce them, to be delicate with them. I approached sex like a military strategist, devising the most efficient tactics to gain my objective." He paused, looking out into the distance, over my shoulder; I couldn't tell if it was to avoid my eyes, or because he was reviewing his memories.

"And it did help, to some extent," he went on. "A few times, the emotions that reflected back at me even wiped out my hunger. But only temporarily, and I'd come back and ... finish."

"What did you do about the temperature difference?" I kicked myself even as I asked – it was like inquiring about the results of Mengele's experiments.

"Bedwarmers. Percolators. Long johns. I always took advantage of the opportunity to have a bath," he said, not seeming appalled at me. "And the old tubs, the ones big enough for President Taft, allowed for company. The point is that I knew that if it was possible for me, with my lack of control, to be with a woman without damaging her, then Edward would find it easier." He gave me a look as I started to speak. "You'll note I said _easier_. Not easy. He was right to be cautious, but I knew he could do it."

"That's what I don't understand. He knew your story, and he knew Kate and Tanya's -"

"Do you _really _know Kate and Tanya's?"

"They sex it up with both sexes, and everyone's happy," I said, wondering what I was missing.

"Since I do not have Edward's compunctions, I can tell you that their partners did not survive, in the beginning."

I put my empty cup down and rubbed my face in frustration. Jasper swapped my teapot for his full one.

"Why doesn't he tell me this?" I complained. "Why does he take all the responsibility on himself?"

"You may have noticed that Edward has a very strong sense of personal responsibility," Jasper said.

"Oh, once or twice," I grumbled. "He's damned bossy."

Jasper's brow furrowed. "No, it's not bossiness – or, it's not meant to be. It's personal responsibility. And it's particularly strong when it comes to you." My heart sank at the reminder of this, and he went on: "I've always wondered if it's some remnant from how he was raised, the influence of the Progressives and do-gooders and teetotalers and Frances Willards he was surrounded by? There was certainly more emphasis on the Protestant work ethic in the North than in the South."

"You mean, you think that if you hadn't owned slaves you be a better … vegetarian?" I asked.

He nodded. "Perhaps. And perhaps Edward's upbringing helped him with his control until he was able to rely on you. In any case, he's not going to use others' failings to excuse or explain his own."

"Wait," I said, confused. "Rely on me? Don't I test his control?"

Jasper looked at me, baffled that I would need to ask. "Of course," he said. "He's not Carlisle."

"So, what do you mean?"

"Having a partner helps control the blood lust – right now, you're a bit of a mixed blessing, but afterward…. Being with Alice has greatly attenuated my thirst and –" he barked a humorless laugh "— that should give a small idea of how powerful it was before I met her. It was excruciating. It will be excruciating sometimes for you, too. Don't be tempted to romanticize it."

I slumped back in my chair, feeling as if this conversation had been more of a workout than yoga class. "Are you trying to talk me out of this?" I asked. "Because for an empath, you have a lousy bedside manner."

"Of course not," Jasper answered without hesitation. "I voted for you. You should be with Edward. Are you ready for me to tell you something more cheerful now?"

"You need to ask?"

"You'll never experience the worst of it, because you'll have Edward," Jasper said. "And he'll have you."

* * *

Edward and I walked out of Sanborn that Wednesday night with Krissy, of Iowa pig-slaughtering fame, who was in the same discussion section for art history class as us. It had been hot in our classroom, and I sighed in pleasure as I felt the breeze of the Indian summer evening on my face. Midterms were coming up, and Krissy suggested that we get together and quiz one another on slides.

Was this a good idea? Edward was silent next to me - he was leaving it up to me to decide.

"Sure," I said. "Somewhere on campus? We live pretty far out of town."

"We can use the common area in my suite," she said.

"I'd like that," I said, with an enthusiasm probably shared by no other student on campus. "You know, I've never been in a dorm."

"Well, then," she said with a snicker, "you'll be annihilated by our sophisticated decor."

She left then for a meeting of the German club, and I turned to Edward. The other students from our class had dispersed, and we were alone in the light spilling from the fanlight window in the building entrance, so I could ask.

"Have _you_ been in a dorm?" I asked.

"I've been assigned to a few dorms, and never actually lived in them. I am a terrible roommate. I keep very odd hours."

"You do keep me up at night," I agreed. "But I think you're a great roommate. So where _did _you live? Did the five of you always get a house together?"

"No, we usually lived at home, with Esme and Carlisle. Rosalie hates moving."

I thought about this a moment. "So in the normal course of events, you all would have gone to UDub? And stayed in Forks until it got dangerous?"

He nodded. Great. Another reason for Rosalie to resent me.

"So why didn't you suggest we do that once I'd decided to go to college and we didn't have to 'disappear'?" I asked.

"Traveling from Seattle all the time would have been too much for you, and there wasn't a college on the peninsula that was suitable. And I wanted your first college campus to be –" he waved his hand elegantly to indicate the old buildings and ur-college town-iness of Hanover "- a real college campus." He paused. There was something else, something that made him uncomfortable.

"And?"

A sigh, an unnecessary shifting of his weight. "I thought it'd be wise to get a fair distance away from Jacob."

Oh.

"It was a good decision," I said after a while, thinking of my traumatic dance with Jacob at the wedding. Relief flickered across Edward's face. "If I'm away, perhaps he'll be more comfortable going home …. Besides, it is a thrill to be here, even if it terrified me. And now we'll get to see a dorm room!"

"I think I'm going to pass on that."

"Because?"

"I don't need to review slides," he said, "and Krissy finds me distracting."

Oh, again. This was something I had to get used to, because if I was going to limit my interactions only to women who didn't find Edward disturbingly attractive, I was never going to talk to anyone outside my family. As it was, I was never going to have a close human friend again, but I could try to have _acquaintances._ At least, I thought, remembering what Jasper had told me, until I couldn't have human acquaintances anymore either.

"Distracting in what way?" I asked, trying to keep a handle on the Bella-possessiveness. "In an 'I'm going to plot "Dynasty"- style to steal your husband away' way?"

"When would you have watched 'Dynasty'?" he asked instead, seeming distracted himself.

"Reruns when I was 13, I think? Sometimes you can't go outside in Phoenix in the summer."

He got a distant look on his face – I could tell he was picturing me curled up on the sofa in Renee's house, my skin blued by the television as the overheated pavement shimmered outside.

"Don't forget the braces and the bad haircut," I muttered.

"I can't imagine that you were anything but adorable," he said softly. And I knew that was true, which made me feel a little more magnanimous about other women.

"Anyway," I prompted him, "Krissy?"

"She has no 'Dynasty' plans that I could hear. She likes you. She's not Jessica, or Lauren."

_Or Tanya,_ I thought to myself. "Did you watch 'Dynasty'?" I asked.

"I didn't have to, since I'm a boy. Poor Esme did. But I had to watch 'Howdy Doody,' so I deserve some sympathy." He leaned down, inviting me to kiss him, so I did.

"'Howdy Doody'?" I asked a bit later.

"Any American teenager in the '60s should have known 'Howdy Doody' references, so I had to watch it for everyone."

"Did you watch 'Dark Shadows' too?"

Edward looked shocked. "My parents would _never_ have allowed me to watch 'Dark Shadows,"' he said.

He sounded so taken aback that even I believed him for a minute until he grinned. "No. Discussing vampire soap operas would be a …little too _meta._" His voice took on the flat Midwestern accent of our English lit prof, who was inordinately fond of that word.

"Totally," I agreed. "So, I'll go study with Krissy and you'll do what?"

He gave me the one answer that he knew would drive me crazy. "Secret vampire stuff."

I missed my chance to give him a dirty look because Alice was appeared next to me then, making me jump. In her right hand was a lilac shopping bag from Bergdorf's that seemed almost as big as she was. I didn't dare ask what was in it, nor did I have time to ask her why she was here. "You have to see this," she said to us both without preamble as she took my hand and pulled me around the corner of the building and over to the Green.

A huge orange moon hung low in the sky, and as we walked along one of the paths I noticed flickering lights and a small group of people dancing on the grass to some swirling music.

"What's that?" I asked the obvious question.

"They're worshipping the Goddess on the night of the full moon," Alice answered.

"Really? I thought I was a student at _Dartmouth."_

"Even at Dartmouth there are devotees of the Goddess," she said before adding excitedly, "And they have hoops! I haven't used a hoop since 1959!"

We were now close enough that I could see a girl in braids and a peasant skirt pick up a hoop from a pile on the ground, slide it down her torso and start gyrating effortlessly. I had tried a hoop myself as a child, but I had been miserable at it.

"Why hoops?" I asked.

"The circle is the symbol of the eternal feminine." She paused at my snort. "Don't get fooled by all the patriarchal bullshit, Bella," she said condescendingly. "The Goddess was first." I couldn't tell if she was joking. "All right," she announced, "I'm getting us some hoops. Do you want one, Edward?"

"They don't want my Y chromosomes messing up the ambiance," he said mildly. Alice shrugged, then handed him her bag and glided to the women swaying in a circle of candles. The lights flickered on her skin.

"Is she serious?" I asked Edward.

"Why not?"

"Is she right?"

"That's something not even I know."

Alice skipped back to us, two hoops in one hand. Edward shook his head and retreated to the shade of one of the trees lining the Green. I knew there was no point in hesitating or protesting as my sister-in-law told me to toss my knapsack aside and then slid a glittering hoop over my head. Holding it up around my torso, Alice reminded me how to move my hips and position my legs in a slight lunge, then gave the hoop a twirl. The plastic was heavy against my waist, surprising me, and the hoop immediately dropped to the ground.

Maybe Edward wouldn't notice how ungraceful I was. No, he'd notice and he'd find it endearing.

How I loved my husband.

Alice didn't find me endearing, though. "Bella, come on, you actually have to move your hips," she said. "Try it again. It should be easier – these are much better hoops than in the '50s." She gave my hoop a spin again, and this time I was able to keep it up for a while, with Alice adjusting it with barely perceptible touches. I had to concentrate so hard on keeping the hoop up that I didn't have time to think too much about how uncoordinated I must have looked.

"Good," Alice said, with a bit of surprise in her voice. "Now I'm going to play."

Alice, of course, was a marvel, gaining incredible speed as the hoop rotated around her stone torso. She moved it up to her neck, and down to her knees, spinning it around one ankle before kicking it off and catching it in midair and twirling it above her head like a lasso. It migrated down her arm and back safely to her waist. I had failed to notice that my own hoop had dropped again to the ground, but I was aware that the girls in the candle ring were staring, along with some library-bound students arrested by her display. Hell, the frat boys in the SAE house up the hill were probably staring from their windows.

"Alice," I whispered nearly inaudibly, "you're being conspicuous."

She moved the hoop back up above her head, then let it go so it rolled off into the darkness. Giggling, she jogged off slowly to retrieve it. Her teeth gleamed in her smiling mouth.

"Keep going, Bella," Alice encouraged me when she returned. "Try it the other direction."

I picked the hoop back up and spun it to the left this time, and it was easier. I shuffled around a bit in time with the music; I must have been better at hooping when I was 8 than I remembered.

Though I couldn't see his face, I sensed Edward's eyes on me as Alice danced nearby without doing any more tricks. She looked like a slumming ballerina, no longer a circus performer. After several more songs, Alice trotted off again to the candles, coming back with a much bigger hoop. I looked at it dubiously – how could somebody hold that up?

"Proximity has made some of the Cullen grace rub off on you, I think," Alice said. "Let's try this."

I lowered my own hoop with trepidation as Alice approached me with the huge hoop poised above her head. "I'll be in back and guide you," she said softly. "I can keep this by up myself, but it would look odd."

She stepped in close behind me and lowered the hoop to our waists. "Lift your arms above your head and bend your knees so we're in line – here's the spin – we're going to need to fail a few times, okay?" The hoop fell to our feet, and after a few tries, Alice spun it for real, pushing her hips into me. Her hands gripped mine above our heads as we undulated with the music. With Alice in charge, I felt graceful and sinuous. With Alice in charge, this probably looked obscene.

I suddenly sensed Edward next to us and opened my eyes. "Alice, that's enough," Edward said quietly, and I stared at him as Alice stilled the hoop and let it land in the grass. He took my hand as I stepped out of the plastic ring and pulled me against his hard body. Perhaps "endearing" hadn't been the right word….

"Good timing," Alice smirked at him a few seconds, then bent over to gather up the hoops. She straightened up and flashed a smile at us. "I'm going to mess with les tribades. Have fun!"

I watched her as she skipped over to the devotees. "She's going to break some girl's heart," I said sadly.

"No, Jasper will be here soon," Edward said. He scooped my knapsack from the ground, and added, "She won't be able to tease him for long. Here," he tugged gently on my hand, leading me back the way we'd come.

"Where –"

"I think I forgot something back in the classroom." He smirked at my skeptical look.

"And you forgot to give Alice her bag back," I said, eyeing the Bergdorf sack dangling from his hand.

"That's unfortunate and uncharacteristic." He paused. "Bella, didn't you find Sanborn exceptionally warm tonight?"

_Oh._

We walked back through the door we'd exited not long before, my sneakers squeaking a bit on the cream and red marble floor of the deserted lobby. The whine of a vacuum cleaner sounded somewhere in the distance. We mounted the left-hand staircase to the silent second floor, and Edward led me to a classroom. It was dark inside, and he didn't turn on the lights, but I could see that the few student desks had been shoved to one wall. The moon had risen and whitened, and rectangles of light from the windows lay slanted on the warped parquet floor. Behind me, Edward clicked the door locked.

The room smelled faintly musty, as if no one had been inside for a few days. It was almost uncomfortably warm here, but not sauna-warm, and I couldn't figure out what Edward's plan was.

"This isn't our classroom," I observed.

"Hmm," he said. He came up behind me and wrapped one arm around my waist. "I thought that I might have left my missing item in here instead." He bent his face to my neck, and breathed in deeply before he spoke again. "Can you occupy yourself for a few minutes? I'm going to check by the window, if that's all right."

"Sure," I answered in a haze, and then he was gone, his clothes and my knapsack on the floor, his body prone. I got it now. This was an old building, with radiators robust enough to heat drafty classrooms in a New England winter. The architects had designed handsome wooden boxes along the row of windows overlooking the Green to hide the unsightly radiators - boxes that were sturdy and wide. Wide enough to lie atop and soak in the heat. As Edward was doing.

From where I stood, his body appeared only in silhouette — his rumpled head, the slope of his powerful shoulders, the delicious dip of his lower back, the beautiful curve of his ass, the smaller curve of his calves.

And I needed to occupy myself for a few minutes.

I took a deep breath, trying to settle the swarm of bees in my stomach, wishing I was coordinated and beautiful, or better, wishing I felt the confidence that I should have from being adored. Edward deserved that.

_Okay. I can do this._ I sat in one of the desks to remove my sneakers and socks, then stood up and stepped over to the rhombus of moonlight opposite Edward. He'd seen me naked so many times now, but this was different - I was making a deliberate effort to be seductive. I started with my sweatshirt, unzipping it slowly, looking beyond Edward's silhouette until I heard his quiet hiss. Once again, I couldn't see his eyes, but I felt them burning into me, heating my skin. I tossed the sweatshirt onto his pile of clothes. My blue henley was next, so I got to undo a few buttons, and as I pulled it off I could hear snatches of the music from the Green. I swayed a little to it, thinking of how I felt moving with Alice on the grass, our arms curling above our heads….

My shirt also obligingly landed on the clothes pile, and now I had to decide whether I should remove my tank next, or my jeans. No, my ponytail holder. My hair spilled out around my face, giving me a little camouflage and the courage to peel off my tank top. Thanks to my personal shopper, I didn't have to worry about my underthings – they were all exquisite, and never around long enough to wear out. My bra was a smoky gray-blue lace one that matched a pair of hiphuggers, and looked pretty fabulous in the moonlight, I could see as I glanced down. Judging from the harsh breathing coming from the window, Edward agreed. But he didn't say anything, which was just what I needed.

The jeans were going to be the hardest part, I knew, and I turned my back to my audience, fumbling with the button and zipper, wriggling the denim down, bending over to step out of the legs. There was a sharp inhale behind me.

Leaving the jeans crumpled where they were, I spun around and walked to the windows, my eyes distinguishing more detail as I got closer. Alice's bag was on the floor by Edward's head, which was propped up slightly by his hands. He didn't reach for me as I neared him, so he must not be ready, I thought, disappointed. I put my fingertips on his moonlit back, feeling the familiar shock of his cold skin.

"Aren't you going to finish undressing?" he asked, his voice low and caressing, curling around my shaky knees. "You have my complete attention, truly."

"I thought you might rather do this next part," I said. He would like to take my clothes off more often, I knew; our methods for dealing with our temperature difference so often required us to disrobe separately. I released a frustrated sigh. "Edward, I just want to jump you _right now_."

He made a noise in this throat. "Baby, so soon - I will remove that lace from your body with immense pleasure... That's it," he said abruptly. "There's a blanket in the bag. You could put it over me?"

Hmm, that had possibilities. I extracted the dense cotton blanket and unfolded it so I could drape it over his back, spreading it from his shoulders to his ankles; his white skin made a beautiful contrast to the dark-red fabric. The radiator was low enough that I could climb up without too much difficulty. My knees had room to straddle his waist, and I was able to lower my hips to press against his backside. I wriggled against him through the blanket, and we both moaned before I stopped still.

"Edward," I said urgently, "won't people see us in the window?"

He turned his head to look at the glass. "The moonlight is making it opaque," he said, and I relaxed above him. "For now."

A little less relaxed, I leaned forward, trying to figure out what I could touch. His forehead now rested on the radiator cover, his forearms crossed above his head, his hands pressed flat against the heated wood as if to get as much warmth as possible. It was a gesture of stillness, of surrender, such a beautiful arrangement that I was reluctant to do anything to disturb it, but my hands ached to feel him.

His hair. His hair was always so soft and silky despite its unruliness, and I slid my fingers in and squeezed gently. He liked that. I liked that.

His ears. My lips brushed along the cool shell, the sensitive lobe. His shoulders arched underneath me. I whimpered.

His neck. My tongue ran from his hairline to his nape, then trailed over to the side, the skin there warming as I dipped down, the rumble in his throat sending vibrations into my mouth. I wanted to bite him, to give this man a mark. I never would be able to.

The tops of his shoulders. I grazed my teeth on the skin there, and this time his hips bucked behind me. Damn, he smelled good, the heat heightening his gorgeous scent in the space where his neck joined his shoulder. I slipped my hands up and over and down his flesh, my palms molding to his collarbones, his chest. _He feels so incredible._ "God, you're almost there," I said, my voice thick with longing. A shudder rippled under my hands.

His arms. I slid my fingers back up and along his arms as far as I could reach, flattening myself against him. That felt so good that I reared up and did it again, rubbing myself unashamedly on his back. Edward turned his head. "Fuck, baby, I can't stand it anymore," he said roughly. "Hold on tight."

I wrapped my arms around his neck as he raised himself off the radiator cover with one hand, and reached around to keep me securely against him with the other. He let me and the blanket slide down to the floor as he stood up, then turned around and pulled me to him. The contrast between his warm chest and his cold back was enthralling.

"We should warm your back up now?" I suggested a little breathlessly.

"Good idea," he agreed, and ducked down to retrieve the blanket. In a second, it was folded and he was sitting cross-legged on it. I stood before him uncertainly.

"Come here, sweetheart," he said softly, and I stepped forward until my thighs touched his knees.

He reached out with both hands and snagged the sides of my panties with his thumbnails, and my underwear dropped to the floor.

"Hey!" I protested weakly, but he murmured, "You said I could do that part," and grasped my hips to pull me on top of him. I found myself straddling him again, my knees protected by the blanket, his tip warm on my back. I took in an unsteady breath, and tugged at the front of my bra.

"You might as well do this part, too," I mumbled.

"Gladly," he said. He yanked the cups apart, and I shrugged off my ruined lingerie. His body jerked as the bra landed on his cock, so I reached a hand behind me and rubbed the soft lining in the cups along his length. I smirked at him when he groaned, but then he said, "That's pleasant, but I'd rather feel your hot little fingers," and I had to moan.

"No, I'd rather put something else there," I whispered, and tossed the bra aside so I could lower myself on him, the movement slick and smooth. Our joining was a sensation beyond words, and he didn't speak either, instead unloosing a loud grunt, and squeezing the edge of the wood under him until I heard it crack.

I stopped moving. "Sorry - are you okay?" I asked.

"Yes. Just give me a second. I was a little surprised," he said, his voice strained. We were still for a few moments, our bodies lighted by the moon and shadowed by the rails of the window, our breaths moving in unison. There should be a way to defuse his tension.

_Yes. I can do this too,_ I told myself. "Edward, can we … try that thing we did in New York?" I asked hesitantly, my own voice strained.

Even in the uncertain moonglow, I could see his face relax and light up. He loved me asking. "What thing was that?" he purred. "We listened to music, we went to a show, we put on a show on the terrace…"

"The fast thing."

"Hmmm, the fast thing." He curved one hand around my hip, and slid the thumb of his other hand down through my curls. "Was this part of the fast thing?"

I jolted at the light stroke of his skin against my clit. "Oh, yes."

"Then try to hold still, baby," he said even as his movements became more insistent and his cock twitched inside me and the two together made it nearly impossible to do what he asked.

"Oh, God," I whimpered under his thumb. "The fast thing, please."

"What was it, exactly?" he purred again as I shuddered on him. "You have to _tell _me."

Being driven insane by an evil tease is the mother of inspiration. "The thing," I breathed out, "where your cock moved in my pussy really, really –"

I didn't have the opportunity to either finish my sentence or feel pleased with myself, because I was suddenly flying, the push and pull and friction amazing, his moan seeming to echo in the nearly empty room. My body bowed and arched and I cried out, and our movements slowed, and then he was holding my hips tight to his as he thrust up and released. I slumped onto his torso, my panting hoarse, and he let go of my hips so he could press my head gently against his chest. We lay silently for a few minutes as our breathing slowed.

I finally raised my head and looked up at him with a smirk. "Yeah, that was the fast thing," I said. "Do you think you'll be able to remember it next time?"

"Oh, I think you'll need to remind me again – in just that way," he said, his mouth curving up in his devastating smile. He brought his hand up to cup my cheek; as I leaned into his palm, I could feel that the tips of his fingers were starting to cool. This was a sadness.

"Did Alice pack a towel, too?" I asked. He nodded yes and reached into the bag, and then we both grunted as I lifted myself off him. I cleaned up and sat back on my heels on the blanket between his legs. He propped himself up on his elbows to look at me.

"I wish you could see how beautiful you are right now," he said.

"Bring a mirror," I joked, deflecting his compliment in embarrassment.

He was completely serious, though. "It wouldn't be the same for you," he said. "I see you so much more clearly than you do yourself."

Ugh. If he saw the imperfections in Vermeer, how much many more he must see when he looked at me? Did all humans appear imperfect and asymmetrical to him?

"Have you ever looked at Penthouse or Playboy?" I asked.

"Yes."

I goggled at him, and he grinned.

"When the first Playboy came out in 1953, it was an important cultural event," he said. "Of course I looked at it. You know, for the articles."

This time I snorted.

"That's where I read "Fahrenheit 451."'

"Really?"

"Really. But the pictures … well." He paused. "I see images of women all the time… And how a woman looks in the mind of the man who loves her is far superior to anything that Photoshop or clever lighting can do. Just as the way I see you can't be captured in a photograph, or comprehended by weak human eyes. Nothing can compare."

He was going to make me implode, saying thing like that. I felt the air whoosh out of me at his words, and I pressed my hand against the glass of the window for support.

Several things happened then in rapid succession. Edward issued one of his rare non-sex expletives, someone yelled out, "Take it off!" from the Green, I got flown to the other side of the room, and a man started singing in the hallway outside the classroom.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what was going on, but Edward was already at the door as someone – the janitor who'd been vacuuming downstairs, it must be – tried the doorknob. The song ended in mid-verse, and the janitor muttered as he slid a key into the lock and tried without success to open it because Edward was keeping the lock lever immobile.

I collapsed into silent, helpless giggles on the floor as the muttering grew fainter and disappeared, and Edward stepped back from the door. He was next to me in a flash and said quickly, "He's going to come back with a co-worker from downstairs to try the door again." That abruptly sobered me. "We need to dress in a hurry, but –" he put his hand on my shoulder so I wouldn't get up "—the window is, um, no longer opaque. Stay right here." Oh dear Christ, that explained the yelling from the Green.

He was back in a second with our gear and Alice's bag. The magical bag also had new underwear for me, and I put it on gratefully even though Alice had gotten her jollies by packing panties that said "spank me" on the butt. Edward grabbed me and everything else as soon as my shoes were on, and sped out the door, closing it behind him before racing me to the staircase at the far end of the hall. As we started down, I heard footsteps coming up the other set of stairs to the second floor.

Holy crap, that was close. I might forget every bit of my childhood after my change, but I was sure I'd never be able to look at a radiator the same way again.

* * *

When Edward had said I needed to have energy for traveling, he wasn't kidding. We'd already gone to Boston and Montreal; a tropical disturbance was going to make it possible for us to go to Jacksonville in a week; and tomorrow afternoon we were heading back to New York for the weekend, for restaurants and paintings and a concert. When I asked where we would stay, he said with a wink, "I've reserved our old room. I really liked the terrace with that one."

Tonight, however, there had been reading and a paper to do. We sat opposite each other at the dining room table, I periodically shifting in my chair to ease the ache in my lower back I'd had since our classroom activities the night before. He had long ago finished his own assignments and was doing something financial on his laptop as I typed on mine, pausing from time to time as he shredded sheaves of documents with his hands.

"Does this interfere with your concentration?" he asked once.

"Yes, but I have to stop and look at you every once in a while anyway, so I might as well watch you turn paper into confetti," I admitted. "Why are you doing that?"

"We've learned to not have identifying papers lying around, in case we need to leave suddenly," he explained. "Jasper's creator, Maria, visited us once and … misbehaved, and we had to get the hell out of Dodge, or rather Calgary, and we didn't have time to retrieve all the papers. Esme was devastated because we had to burn down the house. Luckily we didn't have many paintings there, but we lost a fine Ricciardo, a rather salacious Eros and Psyche. Maybe you would have liked that one."

I didn't take the bait. "How appropriate – instead of a monster, Psyche finds the most beautiful boy in the world in her bed," I murmured. "You're probably right."

My mouth curled a little in triumph when he didn't pursue it. Even though Psyche had to go through agonies, she was the winner in the end: she had immortality - and her beautiful boy. I'd have to go through agonies too, but my beautiful boy was worth everything, even if he didn't always believe it.

It was late before I could pack away my homework and we could get into the shower, the fastest of our methods. Edward dropped to his knees before me as soon as his hands were warm enough to hold my thighs open for his mouth. The shower was his favorite place for this, and I'd finally asked him why; he'd confessed that my scent concentrated in the steam around him and the taste of me on his tongue produced the best version of vampiric intoxication he could imagine – when I'd teased him about being drunk when we'd done this in Chicago, I'd been more right than I would have expected. And knowing how he reacted, I couldn't help but feel awed as I looked down at him.

But then his growl vibrated against my sex, and his hands froze on my skin, his body immobile next to mine. Very slowly he pulled away from me; very slowly he rose to his feet. He turned around to cut off the water on his side, and I did the same to my own. When I turned back around, he wrapped a towel around me.

"Edward, what's going on?" I asked, but even as I did I had a pretty good guess, so I was more curious than alarmed as he helped me step out of the shower. Renee, after all, had done a good job teaching me how to read a calendar.

The question I hadn't asked Rosalie and Alice in New York, the question I hadn't been quite ready to ask him, was about to be answered. I turned to face him, and he put his hands on my hips while keeping himself at arm's length from me.

"I have to figure out what we can do," he muttered.

"No," I said, scowling at him. Whether it was bossiness or "personal responsibility," Edward had it in spades sometimes. "_We_ need to figure it out."

His hands tightened on me, then loosened. "Yes," he finally said. "We do."

* * *

_A/N: You guys crack me up, you're so eager to see Bella throwing up and limping with sciatica. And I loved MasenCullen's theory that Bella has Lyme, and not the "citrus kind." _

_Also, you must all have partners who happily do housework. I wish Mr. Price would insist on doing all the chores._

_The radiator scene is inspired by the interior not of Sanborn but of Kent Hall at Columbia. My apologies to the trustees._

_Many of you have guessed the origin of the chapter titles. They're listed and identified on my profile page now._

_To help out some readers: Brazos = river south of Houston; Jehovah's Witnesses = Christian group whose members dress conservatively and decline to mark Christmas and birthdays as well (Bella would like that part); Frances Willard = suffragist who lived in Evanston, just north of Chicago, and helped found the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which disapproved of drinking alcohol and probably human blood. If there's more let me know. _

_Welcome to my new readers lured here via the Smut Shack. I tried to send teasers to everyone who reviewed the last chapter; my apologies if I missed you._

_Your reviews and encouragement mean so much to me. _


	10. Chapter 10: KIN

_KIN 10.18_

_Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight, and has the royalty checks to prove it._

_NB: This chapter includes not-quite-legal drug use._

Chapter 10: KIN

In the weeks since our honeymoon, I'd come to mentally divide our time on Isle Esme into two phases: B.C. and A.D. - that is, Before Celibacy and After Dream. It wasn't a completely logical division, because it left an uncategorized time in the middle. But it says something about my mindset that I'd decided that our sexless era should also be nameless, like urban neighborhoods that didn't have enough character to get a nickname like the Marais or Bloomsbury or Friedrichshain or Fucking Williamsburg.

As it turned out, that nameless stretch was the part of our honeymoon during which I had my period, timing that allowed Edward and me to avoid whatever difficulties its arrival would bring to our lovemaking. Though we'd never discussed it, I'd noticed that my period did have some effect on Edward - he'd usually spend the night hunting on the second day. Fortunately, while my period was regular, it was brief and infrequent, appearing only every two months; when Dr. Rich, the gynecologist, had noted that on the versions of the pill she favored I'd get it every month, that was yet another reason not to take it. And had Edward and I kept to our original plan for my change, my period wouldn't have been much of an issue at all.

But of course, we hadn't kept to the original plan. And now I was in a towel alone on our bed, while Edward was dressed and perched on the little padded stool that went with the blond mid-century vanity perpendicular to the bed. I'd occasionally wondered why Esme had decided to provide a vanity – surely she knew me well enough to know that I didn't need a special mirror to put on the makeup I never applied or a table on which to artfully arrange the bottles of perfume that Edward would beg me not to use.

"Why are you all the way over there?" I asked. "Why are you wearing clothes?"

"It'd be better to have this conversation when my mind is not completely clouded by lust," he said matter-of-factly. Ugh. This was going to be an unsexy conversation about sex, because it wasn't really about sex, but my safety. Still…

"Your mind is clouded by lust?" I said hopefully.

"Around you? All the time," he answered. "I can't be near you without wanting to make love to you, thinking about making love to you. The second time, on the island, when I was able to be with you without hurting you, it was if I crossed a line, and there's no way to step back over it. I've let myself go in so many ways."

Um, perhaps I was wrong about the unsexy part. I had to collapse onto the bed, and as I stretched my legs out and the towel rode up my thighs, Edward made a small noise in his throat.

"Aren't you cold?" he asked. "Don't you want to get under the covers?"

"Is that a hint?"

"Yes. Please."

I obediently wriggled under the sheets. They felt chilly and alien, unwarmed by the electric blanket, and empty of Edward. My towel had twisted around me uncomfortably, so I pulled it off and tossed it to the foot of the bed. Edward looked pained on the silly stool.

"Thank you," he said. "Though I'm not sure your removing the towel helped."

"Hmm. So. You're always thinking about sex?" I asked as I leant back on the headboard and adjusted the covers over my chest.

"Yes," he said, and I stared at him. I mean, I was pretty sure he thought about it quite a bit, since presumably he was thinking about it while we were having it, but I wouldn't have guessed it was constant. That had to be distracting – at least, it was for me.

"You know," he went on, "most men are too; they just don't have the capacity to think about sex and something else at the same time. As Fitzgerald said, the test of a vampire intelligence is the ability to hold eight opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

I frowned at him, and he shrugged.

"You'll have to forgive the paraphrase," he said. "Does that bother you?"

"No," I said quickly. "I … do it too. This makes me feel that maybe I don't have such a dirty mind after all."

His gaze darkened. "Oh, I'm not saying you don't have a dirty mind," he said. "I'm just saying that I do too."

Oh, maybe we could salvage the night after all. I gave Edward my best come-hither smile, but he sighed and ran his hand through his hair. "This is not how this conversation should go," he said, sounding frustrated, almost angry. "I have to balance my need to make love with you and the imperative to keep you safe."

"What do humans do in this case?" I asked. I really didn't know.

He looked at me doubtfully. "Well, there's no danger involved –"

"I know. I mean other than that."

"It's like almost every variety of sexual experience. Some men are repelled, some are neutral, some enjoy it, a very few make a fetish out of it - I have difficulty imagining why anyone wouldn't make a fetish out of it, but perhaps there's just something odd about me." He grimaced.

"Did my blood affect you in the shower just now?"

"Yes. It smelled wonderful, just as everything about you smells wonderful to me. … I wanted it," he said simply.

"You said you got over it," I said, remembering the time he bandaged my bleeding hand in the woods before the fight with Victoria.

"I said I wouldn't bite you, that I would be unable to hurt you that way," he said. I nodded. "That doesn't mean that your blood wouldn't make me forget to be gentle with you. I have failed to be gentle enough with you before."

"I didn't even notice," I told him again, despite knowing it would do no good. "I'd just like to point out that the last time we had this discussion about whether I would be safe, I was right. You prove me right every day, sometimes –" I couldn't help but look up through my lashes at him – "several times a day."

He wasn't buying it. "That's different. I always have to be gentle with you, and it's become like … well, not breathing so much for me, but some other autonomic response – like watching out for other predators, other threats." He paused. "And I'm a threat to you right now."

I didn't like where this was going. "Don't leave," I said, sudden tears making my voice tight.

"Bella, the one thing I can't do is leave. Sweetheart, please…." He stood and stepped toward me, then stopped himself, reminding me of the times he had described to me when he wanted to touch me in the weeks after we first met, and told himself he shouldn't.

"I trust you, you know," I whispered.

"You're so courageous."

"No!" My voice was sharp. He had to realize how wrong that was. "I'm not courageous, because I don't think you'll hurt me. You can't be brave if you're not afraid."

"Then I must be brave, because I am afraid," he said quietly.

I exhaled and tried to think before responding, taking the time to pull my hair into a knot and then letting it go. That we were having this talk at all represented such a big step forward for us, a step beyond even the discussion we'd had about venom. Kate and Tanya could reassure him that venom on unbroken skin wouldn't make me start writhing in agony, but no vampire would ever tell him that my blood wasn't a dangerous lure. I wouldn't be able to be part of this conversation, of his choice, if I tried to play down his fears. And the truth was, he had a much better understanding than I did about what he was capable of in this case. _Don't romanticize it,_ Jasper had said.

"Tell me what you're thinking, please," Edward pleaded as the silence stretched on.

"I'm thinking that I have to balance my body's need to persuade you to make love with me with my mind's respect for your judgment about what you can handle," I answered finally.

"_Bella_," he breathed out, saying so much with that one word.

Talking through what we could and couldn't do because of our limitations was one of the hardest conversations I'd ever had, more painful than the one we'd had when I couldn't bring myself to tell him I wanted him to make love to me and I gave up and just tried to seduce him instead. He was too far away for me to hide my face in his neck, and he was too solemn for me to make the jokes that were one of my coping mechanisms. We came up with a solution that was going to be difficult for me, but I had to remind myself that trusting himself enough to do it was going to be even harder for him.

I woke up a few hours later, suddenly wide awake. The playlist of Edward's music I'd put on to help me go to sleep was long silent; the nightgown I wasn't used to wearing tangled around my legs. The room was dark, but the sky outside was lightening in preparation for dawn.

"Edward," I called out, sure he was here. I could see or hear nothing, but I could have sworn, even though it was impossible, that I could smell him - his own scent layered with the earthiness of the forest and whatever animal had nourished him on his solitary hunt.

"Yes. Everything's okay. Go back to sleep," he said softly. He was just inside, in the shadows next to the glass door. His voice was tense.

A snippet of our conversation in the cabin, about hunting, came back to me then_. "I will drain the blood from animals and have a raging hard-on, which will be directed at you, Mrs. Cullen, so be prepared."_

"You don't really want me to go back to sleep," I said.

"No," he admitted, still by the door. "I don't."

"Then you'll need to come closer."

My eyes were adjusting now to the darkness, and as he moved toward me, all the light in the room seemed to be concentrated on his face. He stopped at the edge of the bed across from me, and his hand gripped the curve of the headboard. I could almost hear the gouged oak complain. I could almost see the tension radiating from his body.

I pulled the sheets off me then, revealing my white eyelet gown; it too seemed to glow in this dark. I turned on my side to face him. "Undress for me," I asked almost inaudibly.

He took in a ragged breath, and groaned. "I want you too," I whispered, to remind him that he was being affected by more than just my blood. He nodded.

He dragged off his brown sweater in that guy way, reaching behind his neck, letting the material ride up slowly to expose his torso to me. I watched in fascination as each inch became visible, my breaths quickening despite the familiarity of the gesture, his skin seeming to emit ever more light. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them off with his boxers, and there he was, exquisite and tense. My breathing accelerated even more.

"Your turn." He sounded almost in agony.

I flushed in the dark and surveyed my gown, squinting at the long row of tiny buttons closing the front. I would be far less elegant than Edward was with his sweater in pulling it over me, and undoing the buttons would take excruciatingly long. He needed release, not seduction.

What Would Edward Do? I asked myself, and had my solution. I rolled onto my back again and yanked at the scoop neck of my gown; the top button easily popped off, and the rest surrendered to my tugging hands without complaint. The fabric fell away on both sides of me, uncovering my torso and naked sex. I was panting. Edward wasn't breathing. His body was stock-still.

"Baby, let me see," I murmured and turned my head to him, quelling my impulse to stretch my arm out and reach for him. Instead, I covered my left breast with one hand, the tenderness of its curve reminding me why we couldn't touch, and slid my other down farther, to slip in the dampness between my legs as Edward took himself in his hand. I shuddered as he stroked himself, pulling his cock to his right, something about my husband I hadn't known. _That should be my hand there_, I thought, but I was already too far gone to think more coherently than that. I had been so nervous about exposing myself to Edward this way, but my fear was gone now as I saw him watching me in a mixture of desire and anguish, gripping the headboard again to ground himself. A piece of wood broke off before my eyes, this evidence of his need for me making me shake and cry out. His release was cold on my skin, and I cried out again at the feeling.

I turned my head and found that I was staring into the big circular mirror of the vanity, whose purpose and positioning had suddenly become clear to me. I was stunned for a moment – there was Edward, achingly beautiful in his release, and a strange woman supine in front of him, her breasts jutting out as her back arched in her own. She too was beautiful, transformed, in that moment.

"Edward," I whispered, "look at what you do to me."

He landed heavily on the bed, still too far away, but he leaned over, daring to caress my cheek with a fingertip, his face clear now. "Oh, Bella," he murmured. "I can't look away."

New York had the benefit, at least, of offering many distractions - museums I hadn't yet visited, plays that Edward hadn't seen either, cuisines I'd never tried - that kept us out of the dangerous confines of our hotel room. While we could each find release in watching the other, for a couple accustomed to, addicted to, our bodies sliding against each other, it was not fully satisfying. We were always left wanting more.

The siblings, well aware of our situation, discreetly did their best to distract us. Edward and I even went with them to a basement in SoHo that was one of those clubs you see drunken celebrities stumbling out of in pictures on Page Six, and I discovered that it did really help to be drunk in those places. Unfortunately, since I wanted to not be tempted to launch myself at Edward, alcohol wasn't on my diet plan that weekend, and our obligatory drinks ended up inebriating our neighbors. And dancing seemed unwise. Instead, we watched Alice and Jasper and Rosalie and Emmett dance and casually rebuff drunks of both sexes.

While Edward worried about control in New York, I worried about tremors, and since they seemed to ease at Edward's touch, I was thankful that I didn't have an episode when our physical contact was constrained. With so much stress, it was actually a relief to get back to studying for midterms. Which we did, but not before celebrating the end of my period by redoing the shower scene that we'd had to interrupt.

I had my study date with Krissy, and I had to laugh when she showed me the "sophisticated décor" of the suite in East Wheelock she shared with another girl and two guys. The common room had a sagging blue sofa, a square table with a couple of chairs, and one crooked poster of a Picasso pencil drawing. It was quite a contrast to the small museum's worth of art at my house.

We went over the pictures of the artworks we might have to describe in our midterm, from the simple charm of the drawings at Lascaux to the deteriorating skill of the art in the late Roman Empire, and I found that Krissy had little problem naming them - she had an amazing memory trained by spelling bee practice. As for me, it was easy to recognize the Venus of Willendorf, but it was more difficult to keep track of the many naked Greek boys we had to identify: the kouroi with their beatific smiles, the young gods with their Praxitelean sway. True to vampire esthetics, Edward preferred the clumsiness of the kouroi to the near perfection of Phidias.

"It freaks me out a bit to see uncircumcised penises," Krissy confessed as we clicked through a series of sculptures on the class web page.

"Huh," I answered absently, having just realized something about the era in which Edward was born. I shook my head after a moment. "Then it's a good thing that most of the statues don't have them anymore," I said. "But since you're a farm girl, shouldn't you be used to seeing lots of penises?"

"Oh, come on, we didn't walk around naked on the farm," she snorted. I felt myself flush, but she added, "Don't worry, I know what you mean. I haven't seen many human penises, circumcised or not."

_Neither have I,_ I didn't say aloud.

"I'm sorry to be bitchy," Krissy went on. "It's just that people here have such stupid ideas about farms and farmers. I was in the dining hall the other day, and this girl from I don't what suburb was telling me how she'd never be able to send animals off to slaughter - and she was eating _pepperoni _pizza. And the girl next to her was saying smugly that's why she was a vegetarian as if she was some sort of save-the-earth saint while she was eating mozzarella that was made either with calf stomach or that nasty genetically modified rennet. Vegetarians are such idiots some- wait, you're not a vegetarian, are you?"

"Not yet," I said without thinking, and Krissy looked at me, confused. "I mean, no, I'm not. I couldn't be after I had such great pork belly in New York," I added to divert her.

"Huh, wonder if it was ours?" she said. "We raise pastured pork, and a lot of it ends up in fancy restaurants." We pretty much gave up on studying then, and Krissy told me about her life in Iowa – the camaraderie of working with her brothers and parents, the tension that came from knowing that bad weather or disease could wipe out a year's profits in an instant, the isolation from living more than an hour away from a town of any size. "Getting that paid trip to Washington for the bee was a big deal for us," she said. I tried to one-up her by noting that it would take me nearly three hours to drive to Seattle, but it didn't work: "So you end up in Seattle, and I end up in Ames," she laughed. "No contest. I win."

Krissy's suitemates filtered in - Matt and Evan, both from Scarsdale, and Anna, from Zurich, as well as Matt's girlfriend, Sophie, from down the hall – and soon we were all chatting easily, though Krissy occasionally had to help Anna with American slang. We talked about music and Boston and politics, and Anna about things in this country that were odd to her, and I remembered Renee promising me, one day when she'd finally badgered me into confessing that I didn't feel a connection to any of the other students in ninth grade, that I would have no trouble finding compatible friends at college. I could see being friends with Krissy and all her suitemates. Except, of course, that I couldn't.

"Who wants a beer?" Evan asked after a while, getting off the sofa to head to the mini-refrigerator in his room. "Bella?"

"No, thanks. I have to drive home."

"You do? You live off campus?"

"Yes, with my husband." Everyone except Krissy stared at me as if I'd just announced that my favorite singer was Céline Dion. "Well, I certainly know how to stop a conversation," I said dryly.

A lot of "when" and "where" and "how" questions followed, which I answered as truthfully as I could while being as banal as possible. "Was it love at first sight?" asked Anna in her charmingly Swiss-German/British-accented English.

I smiled. "We certainly noticed each other right away –"

"How could you _not _notice Edward right away?" Krissy broke in, and I had to shrug and agree, because it was true.

"- but it took a few weeks for us to really talk. Edward wasn't sure he was ready for a relationship. And there were times I felt that way too." That was true too.

"Why did you get married so young?" This came from Matt, whom I had caught looking at Sophie speculatively during this conversation. Another eager guy.

There were a lot of responses I could give to that: my husband didn't want to live in sin; marriage meant we could live off-campus; Edward had to drag me kicking and screaming to the altar. They were all cheap outs for me.

"It's what we wanted to do," I said simply.

Fortunately this answer stilled any remaining questions the others might have had, and the talk drifted off to other topics. My phone softly buzzed with a text and I retrieved it from my knapsack.

_**Praxiteles is a prat. May I come to you now?**_

I felt a stab of longing. Edward's "secret vampire stuff" turned out to be playing the grand at the siblings' house, so he wasn't terribly far away. I typed back as quickly as I could:

_**Yes. I miss you.**_

For suddenly I did - it was like a blow to my gut. And, oh my God, I was starting to tremble. I shoved the phone in my sweatshirt pocket, then slipped off to the suite bathroom and locked the door. I gripped the sides of the sink and stared at myself in the mirror above it. My color had vanished and my eyes were black, as if the pupils had swallowed my irises. My hands loosened and tightened on the sink's plastic edges in time to the waves of tremors sweeping over me, but there was enough room in my mind to try to regulate my breathing as we had been doing in yoga class. _Breathe in, one two three four five hold. Breathe out, one two three four five hold. Breathe in…_

By the time Krissy knocked on the door, the shaking had eased, but I wasn't sure how much time had passed.

"Bella," she called, "Evan's ordering pizza." There was an edge of distaste in her voice at the idea of pizza. "Do you want some?"

_Breathe in. "_No, thanks. I need to head home soon anyway," I replied.

Just then, my phone buzzed again in my pocket.

_**I'm outside.**_

He was waiting for me. I splashed cold water on my face to get a little bit of color in my cheeks, and then typed.

_**I'm coming.**_

My feet flew me downstairs to Edward.

My concerns about possible insanity, distractibility and sauna/electric blanket/hot tub exertions aside, I was greatly relieved to find that I was apparently more qualified for elite-college work than I would have predicted. Sure, I didn't score as well as Edward on midterms, but I did identify all those naked Greeks correctly. We also had conferences with our remedial writing instructor, a young, balding Irishman named Francis whose sweet, patient demeanor turned melancholic after (as Edward told me) he learned that Dartmouth wasn't going to renew his contract. That was a shame, because his edits of my work were on the mark, and my papers for English Lit were much better as a result.

Francis didn't have much of an office, so he arranged to meet us one afternoon in _that _classroom in Sanborn, and I went first. My eyes flickered involuntarily to the radiator cover and lost focus for a moment. There was a long piece of the beveled edge missing now.

The sound of a chair scraping on the floor made me turn back to Francis. We sat in facing desks, and he shuffled a stack of my essays before he looked up at me. "Why are you in this class?" he finally asked.

Crap, maybe I was doing really horribly. "Um, to learn how to be a better writer?" I said uneasily.

He sighed. "Sorry, it wasn't meant to be a trick question," he said. "No, were you assigned this class, or did you decide to take it on your own?"

"I was told to take it."

He looked puzzled. "Indeed? Because your essays place you comfortably in the range of students here. Was Edward told to take it, too?" he asked, sounding highly dubious.

"Absolutely not. I suspect his essays place him as the best you've seen."

"It's like having bloody Orwell in my class," he muttered. It was impressive – Francis had unwittingly dated Edward perfectly. "Do you take all your classes together?"

"No."

He looked baffled again, shook his head and started going over my essays with me. "Overall, you're doing very well," he concluded. "You have good introductions and closings, you have a logical structure. You just have to watch out for being elliptical. No one can read your mind, you know."

"Yeah, Edward tells me that all the time."

Edward was waiting outside the classroom, leaning against the wall and hiding a smug grin behind a thick paperback with Cyrillic lettering. I thought it might be Pushkin. He lowered the book as I approached and pulled me to him. "I told you this place would be a breeze," he murmured into my hair.

"Hmmph," I made my Charlie noise. "You're on, George," I muttered, as Francis called him in.

Now it was my turn to wait. I could hear Edward's beautiful laugh float out from the room, making it impossible to concentrate on my psychology textbook. What were they talking about? I couldn't recall Edward ever being friendly with our teachers before - he treated Mr. Banner and Mr. Berty with a polite remoteness that only barely concealed his impatience.

"What was with all the laughter?" I asked as we exited Sanborn.

"He was quarreling with my interpretation of the double lives in "The Mayor of Casterbridge," but not seriously. He was just taking the piss. He also told me -" and here Edward switched accents - "that I should get the foooook out of his classroom."

I laughed, because his imitations were just so perfect, but I added a little glumly, "Yeah, because you don't need to be there."

"No, he said it was because I spent all my time making cow eyes at my wife."

I disregarded that. "You know, I never saw you be friendly with a teacher back home," I said. "But you do it in college?"

"No," he said, considering me a moment. "You really are turning me into a softy."

The siblings' house made me want to laugh every time it jumped out at me on the final turn of the drive. It was a sprawling fake-Gothic extravaganza with towers and turrets and a crenellated roof and a score of rooms, such a cliché that you couldn't imagine a supernatural creature sanely choosing to live there. As the Cullens liked, it was surrounded by dense woods, but occasionally, depending on the curve of the road and the elevation, you could get a glimpse of it from far away.

The property was substantial enough that its sale merited a mention in The Valley News:

_The old Fenwick Castle outside Hanover has a new owner. Reja LLC, a limited liability corporation with a Concord mailing address, filed a warranty deed last week at the Grafton County Registry of Deeds. The attester was a Concord lawyer, Scott Jouvert, who declined to furnish any details about the sale other than to say that his client was a private individual who planned to use the house as a secondary residence. _

_Reja,_ I thought when Edward showed me the article. Rosalie is first again.

_The property was sold by the estate of Millicent Delahunt, whose lawyer would not disclose the price. No mortgage was filed at the registry office, indicating a cash sale._

_Fenwick Castle has had a checkered history. Finished in 1914, it was built of local stone by Horace Fenwick, a Portsmouth shipping heir. Fenwick's design was noted for its intricate interior woodwork, secret passageways and hidden rooms. In his quest for historical accuracy, Fenwick rejected the idea of installing any method of heating other than fireplaces, and he died of pneumonia soon after moving in. In the decades since, there have been several owners of Fenwick Castle, and almost as many attempts to update the heating. None has been particularly successful, and the Delahunt family used the castle exclusively as a summer house._

_Celia Thaxton, president of the Grafton County Historical Society, recalled that for some years in the 1970s, the owners, the Langdon family, turned Fenwick Castle into a "haunted house" for Halloween and opened it to local residents. "It would be lovely if the new owners would consider doing that again, and giving their neighbors a chance to see the interior of this historic structure," she said. _

Only Emmett had thought this suggestion had merit.

Tonight, I winced instead of grinning as Edward ran me up to Fenwick Castle for a probably chilly evening. It was the night of Halloween, which as Jasper had told me the Cullens studiously avoided, and also a Saturday, which met one of my criteria for enduring the human experience my vampire family wanted to watch me having: I didn't want to have to go to class the next day. My other requirement was that we didn't do this at my house.

We had dropped the Volvo off at home after dinner at a new trattoria up the road in Lyme that had water buffalo Bolognese. Edward had been bemused by my assessment: tasted like beef.

"It smells quite different to me," he said. "I'm beginning to wonder if food might be wasted on humans."

He'd had the same reaction at other restaurants when I'd declared that squab or frogs' legs or alligator pretty much tasted like chicken. Food disgusted him, yet he could discern so many nuances in it that escaped me - as we waited for our table he had explored the small market of Italian products in front of the restaurant, and I'd had to pull him away from the Parmigiano display when the hostess called us. In our kitchen was now a chunk of the cheese that he'd determined, based on the smell, I'd like the best.

As we walked into the house, we could hear the sounds of a television and followed them into the library. The library was my favorite room at Fenwick; it had comfortable leather sofas and ottomans, the capitals on the wooden pilasters separating the bookshelves were vignettes of medieval scholars working and drinking and wenching, and it was small enough that the huge, inefficient fireplace actually had some effect. A fire was blazing in there now, throwing lights on the mullioned windows and making the room a few degrees warmer than the rest of the house. I kept my jacket on.

Alice, Jasper and Emmett were staring at a computer screen and debating the verisimilitude of "Mad Men," one of the few television shows the Cullens watched willingly – Emmett had already told me that he had volunteered me to watch the next generation's version of "iCarly."

"Rosalie, you had a dress like that!" Alice called out. Rosalie blurred into the room from wherever she was and stared at the screen as Joan the voluptuous office manager paraded by in a formfitting pink sheath.

"I did," she agreed. "It looked better on me, though." That was probably indisputable, I realized.

"Did you have hair like that too?" I asked, noting Joan's elaborate updo.

"That was a great era for Rosalie," Alice said as Rosalie nodded. "It was a bad one for me. I had to be beatnik girl."

Jasper shook his head in dissent. "She looked fantastic," he told me.

Alice sighed. "It was such a conformist time," she said. "I was so thrilled when Twiggy showed up with her cropped hair."

"I was thrilled that I could stop wearing hairspray," Rosalie added. "Such a horrible smell."

"Hey, Edward," Emmett interrupted, his eyes still on the computer. "He just paid 10 thousand for a Rothko." The screen showed ad executives examining a big red and orange Color Field painting. "We spent only $2,650.50."

"Yes, but we bought earlier," Edward said. "Ten thousand was a good price for '63."

"_Nineteen _sixty-three," Jasper jokingly clarified for me, but I was distracted by Emmett.

"And 50 cents?" I asked.

"Fifty cents meant something in 1956," Emmett said, shrugging.

"Bella, I need your help," Rosalie said suddenly, and turned to walk out of the library. I looked up at Edward, confused, and he gave me a small smile in reassurance.

I followed Rosalie downstairs to the basement kitchen, which had another huge fireplace, this one with a spit in it put there by Fenwick. Later owners had added more modern fixtures, but the room was still cavernous and drafty.

"Are you baking?" I asked as I walked in. "It smells really good."

"Does it?" she murmured dubiously.

"I didn't know that your appliances even worked."

"Of course they do," Rosalie snorted. She was wearing short shorts and a gingham halter under her apron, as if she was fulfilling some "Hee Haw" fantasy for Emmett, despite the glacial temperature of the house. "Here, look in the oven and tell me if these are ready."

She leaned over to look in the oven window. I couldn't see anything, of course, and sighing, turned on the oven light.

"Brownies? Do you think I'll get the … munchies?"

"I certainly hope so," she said, her tone implying that I'd better. "So, are they ready?"

I looked again, and saw crackling on the tops of the brownies.

"Yes," I decided. "Have you ever made brownies before?"

"I doubt it," Rosalie said as she pulled out the pan from the oven. "I was brought up to be decorative, not useful. Perhaps brownies hadn't been invented yet in the '30s."

"Oh," I said faintly, feeling very young as I did so often around my family. "Um, do you have a cooling rack?"

"Yes. I can take care of the rest of this," Rosalie said, shooing me out. "I borrowed one of your cookbooks, though I had to hide it from Emmett. He wanted to do the brownies."

We eventually all settled around a low square table in the library, sitting on pillows set out on the floor for my benefit; I used one to cushion my back as I leaned against Edward's hard chest and stretched my legs toward the space heater also set out for me. Alice was wearing a fluttering sleeveless chiffon dress and the ivy necklace I'd bought her in Chicago, and it indeed looked extraordinarily charming on her collarbones. I tried not to roll my eyes as Rosalie set a plate of brownies next to me, not sure how she'd react. Emmett was to my right, rolling a cigarette; his large fingers were deft, and I imagined he'd rolled his own as a teenager in the Smokies. I stopped myself from making the dumb joke.

"Lick it," Emmett said, waving the cigarette in front of me, his thumb holding the edge up. Rosalie snickered, predictably, which made Em guffaw in turn. Edward shook his head, then kissed the top of mine.

"Why can't _you _lick it?" I grumbled at Emmett. Since I was doing this mainly for their entertainment, I didn't feel much need to be gracious.

"The venom will make it disintegrate," he explained patiently. Huh.

I dutifully licked, and Emmett pressed down the paper and lighted the cigarette himself. He took a drag, holding the smoke in for a while, then he nodded and exhaled slowly.

"It's safe for her. And it's a lot stronger than the shit from the 70's," he announced. "If it doesn't get you high, Bella, you must have some super THC shield as well."

I stared at him. "Do you do that a lot?" I asked.

"We've tried lots of things over the years, things we could smoke or snort, usually," Jasper answered for him. "Pot, hash, coke, mushrooms, opium, heroin … Not acid, though – Carlisle read the studies and they bothered him. And crack just seemed unpleasant? But nothing has had an effect on us, though we can sense the differences in their chemical make-ups."

"And we all smoked cigarettes when it was fashionable," Alice added, "though not Carlisle, not even when doctors were endorsing cigarettes. He could see the effects on his patients. But Edward did during his James Dean phase…"

I turned around to stare at my husband now. "Well, you have the hair, but not the voice, thank God. So, black leather jacket, white T-shirt? Bad boy with perfect grades?"

He nodded. "And cigarettes. They made us look more human – gave us something to do with our hands. Though the smell…"

"Revolting," Rosalie said. "I'm so glad we don't have to do that anymore."

"And have you tried everything too?" I asked Edward. I simply couldn't imagine him smoking a joint. I was having a hard time imagining him smoking Chesterfields.

"As you know, Bella, Edward's a strong proponent of the just say no school," Rosalie said.

This time, I felt free to roll my eyes at her. I didn't come over here to get razzed about sex.

Edward answered my question. "Carlisle and I – and Rosalie, when she's acting mature – are the doctors. _They" – _he waved at Emmett, Jasper and Alice - _"_are the guinea pigs. We are standing by in case something goes wrong."

"So we could take notes and write it up in The Annals of Vampiric Physiology," Rosalie cracked. "No, we knew they'd be fine. But it wouldn't be safe for all of us to be loopy at the same time. Not that any of us ever got loopy."

"Doesn't it bother you that it's illegal?" I knew it was a stupid question for a family of car thieves, but I wasn't Charlie's daughter for nothing.

Rosalie and Emmett looked at each other, then burst out singing: "_Some get a kick from cocaine/I'm sure that if/I took even one sniff/That would bore me terrifically too/Yet I get a kick out of you." _

I turned around to look at Edward again. "'Anything Goes,' 1934," he explained.

"A wonderful production," Rosalie said dreamily. "My first Broadway show. I was finally able to sit in a theater with people."

"Bella, we were around when all these things were legal," Edward continued, "so it's hard to get exercised about it that now they're not."

"What about drug lords and stuff, though?"

"True, but that – " he nodded at the cigarette Emmett still held – "comes from a greenhouse in Vermont where patients go for medical marijuana. You're ethically pure, sort of."

"Oh, you have a prescription?" I asked sarcastically.

"Why, yes!" Alice trilled. "I have problems with my appetite - solid food makes me nauseated." She winked.

"Really?"

Alice shook her head. "No, it doesn't work that way in Vermont. But Jasper and I did go to a greenhouse. Don't worry, we're not being that illegal."

"Is that like being a little pregnant? Or very dead?"

"Very dead works for me," she said.

"If it's so strong," Edward addressed himself to Emmett now, "shouldn't we get something less overwhelming?"

Emmett considered that for a moment. "Will you ever do this again?" he asked me.

"Definitely not," I said.

"Then, I say she should do it now and have the best shot at getting high as she can." Emmett looked at me expectantly.

"Fine," I groused. "Hand it over."

I knew I would look stupid, since I'd never even smoked a cigarette, and I fully met my expectations. I coughed. I couldn't hold the smoke in. My eyes watered. I tried a waterpipe, which was a little better. But I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Emmett, Jasper and Rosalie tried to show me how to play whist, a game I knew only from 19th-century novels, and then we moved on to poker. While they may not have had the mind-reading or fortune-telling powers of their disqualified siblings, they couldn't help but count cards and demolish me. It didn't help that the cards were an old French pack with different numbers and letters from what I was used to, and Jasper dealt the hands in a blur that I couldn't follow. I was soon wiped out of matchsticks, and I grumbled about that, too.

Emmett, who had spent the last hour using every slang name for marijuana that had been invented in the last century, surprised me. "Sorry, Bella, are we being too hard on you?" he asked, putting his cold hand on mine.

I suddenly felt a wave of love for all of my family gathered around this table. This was my equivalent of Krissy's suitemates, I thought suddenly, only we'd never drift apart as college friends did. I shot a look at Jasper, but he shrugged, mutely saying the emotion was coming all from me. They were just trying to be with me, to be part of this human experience. And I knew they loved me too – well, apart from Rosalie, and perhaps she even did too, deep down.

"Naw," I answered. "I know that it wouldn't be as much fun for you if I didn't complain." Since Emmett was right next to me, I was able to kiss the tip of his nose. I think he would have blushed if he could have.

Jasper fetched another box of matches for me and the game continued, with the siblings telling me about their trips to Vegas over the decades. (Frank Sinatra! Marlene Dietrich! Louis Prima! Céline Dion! "You went to a Céline Dion show?" I asked incredulously. A quartet of fingers pointed accusingly at Emmett.) Edward and Alice always made sure to just come out even, since using their abilities seemed akin to cheating. But perfect recall and a vise-like grasp of probabilities were things some humans had too, so the rest of the family cleaned up at the tables without guilt.

"But Jasper can influence the other players to make reckless bets," I objected.

"So can free drinks and a pretty croupier," Jasper responded.

"You are pretty, Jasper," I agreed.

Chance seemed to smile at Rosalie tonight, and matches piled up in front of her. I ate a brownie to be polite, and I complimented her because they were pretty good. I didn't tell her that it's hard to mess up brownies. I listened to the vaguely psychedelic music that Alice put on, which I thought was odd at first – didn't we want the Grateful Dead? I bet Alice couldn't stand Deadhead clothes, though - but it grew on me. _I lost myself inside someone else/ I couldn't see the lines between her and me … What are you afraid of?/ All the years fade away … _I wondered who the Lahire and Ogier on my cards were. I leaned against Edward and thought about his thighs alongside mine. He ran his hands lightly along my covered arms. That made me think about his fingers. That made me think about what his fingers did.

"Nothing?" Emmett eventually asked Jasper, apparently hoping I was just hiding the effects well.

"Oh, Bella's high all right," Jasper said, nodding at me wickedly. Emmett's expression turned eager. "She's high on Edward." Emmett cursed in disgust, and Alice and Rosalie giggled at him. Edward's hands stilled on me.

I stretched luxuriously and got to my feet. "I cannot express what a great sense of satisfaction I get from that. Besides, don't you know you can't get high your first time?" I said to Emmett.

He scowled. "I thought you might prove an exception. You're not normal, after all."

I turned to my husband. "Okay, it's bedtime for Bella, now. Take me home?"

Edward touched his lips to mine at the door before slinging me on his back and suddenly all I could think about was kissing him for hours. I saw Alice's face break into a huge grin as she waved goodbye. Our trip through the woods separating our houses seemed to take longer than usual; the wind felt soft on my face, the moonlight was almost tangible.

"Did you run more slowly tonight?" I asked when we had arrived home and shed our coats and shoes.

"No." He looked at me curiously. "Your eyes are almost completely black. How are you feeling?"

"Smoky." I sniffed at my hair, and then rose on my tiptoes to smell his. "I'm going to take a shower to wash this odor off. You should too?" I made it an invitation.

Afterward, I lay next to the hot tub on the waterproof mattress we'd bought after our first uncomfortable encounter in the water, flushed from the heat of the shower and our activities there. The rough nap of the towels covering the mattress felt pleasant against my back, but I turned on my left side so I could face Edward. He was in the bubbling water, his chin resting on the edge of the tub. I reached my right hand out to trace his lips, over and over, trying to wrap my mind around the smoothness of them. He patiently allowed me to run my fingers over his face, his eyelids, the flesh that was so hard underneath, so silken at the surface. I felt the same wonder that I did the first day in the meadow. After I don't know how long, my arm started shaking with the exertion I hadn't noticed, and I let my hand drop down to the mattress.

It was his turn then. His hand was wet and warm from the tub, and his fingers left trails of droplets on my skin, from the corner of my mouth, along the side of my waist, my hip, my calf and back up, then repeated the circuit, endlessly, switching to his left hand when his right hand cooled. I felt the narrow track of fire from his fingertips. His face looked wondering, and I didn't know why. He eventually shifted his path, from my collarbone over my breasts and down between my legs, leaving me moaning but not impatient. I felt content to lie here for hours and be stroked.

"Are you ambidextrous?" I asked him finally. One hand felt as skilled as the other.

He laughed. "I'm just dextrous — uh, dexterous," he said, and continued his work.

My trance was broken when Edward launched himself from the tub in one smooth movement, settling himself between my legs. His body felt hot against my cool skin, and I gasped in surprise. I heard his sharp intake of breath.

"The contrast is so amazing," he murmured. "I get to warm you up for once."

"You always… uh, warm me up," I said rather distractedly, as he rubbed his heated tip against my folds, gathering up a smoother liquid than that from the tub. He pushed in, then stilled so he could rest his chest against mine, allowing me to revel in his warm skin against mine. I lay quiet beneath him, needing no more than this contact, feeling no urgency. After a while, though, he sighed, and slowly moved in me, pulling back and up to snake his hand between us, stroking me. The speed of his thrusts built up slowly but surely, and I moved my hands to his back, gliding them over his skin, feeling the muscles bunch and release under my fingers.

I floated on the verge forever, needing only the slightest of pushes to go over. He finally groaned in my ear. "I need you, love, I always need you, I need you now," he said, and there was my push, and then his.

When I woke up, I was in bed, the blanket turned off. I felt lethargic and my eyelashes were crusted over with sleep. My mouth tasted awful. The sky was gray, so I couldn't guess what time it was. I could hear music from the living room, Glenn Gould performing the Goldberg Variations, though I wasn't familiar enough with them to say more than that. I knew that much only because Edward had played it a few times.

Gould's playing was so precise that I had asked Edward once while how he could stand it, but he had replied that music was different from painting, though he couldn't explain why.

_"Why is it that I have venom in my mouth and eyes, but not in my semen?" he had asked, shrugging. "That's just the way it is."_

_"Maybe it's all in your head?" I had joked._

_"Which head?"_

_"Remind me, which one of us is Beavis in the relationship, and which one Butthead?"_

_"God help me," he had said mournfully, "she knows 'Beavis and Butthead' but not the Talking Heads."_

I turned my face from the window to find Edward sitting on the side of the bed, and I flinched in surprise, to his delight.

"Good afternoon," he said cheerfully. I groaned at having slept the morning away. "How are you feeling?"

"Wiped out, but not headachy or anything like that, so I guess it doesn't feel like a hangover." I pushed myself up to sitting, and folded a pillow behind my back. "Was I actually high?"

"I don't know." He smirked. "I mean, you didn't laugh uncontrollably, or come up with a theory of the Big Bang involving the Smurfs and Velveeta, but you were not your usual self."

I was relieved I hadn't babbled.

"It _was_ pretty strong," he went on.

"_You_ tried it? How did I miss that?"

His mouth twitched.

"Edward Cullen, next time you smoke a joint, I want to see it," I said sternly.

"Does that mean there'll be a next time?"

"Uh, no. … Why couldn't Jasper tell?" I asked. "Or was he lying to annoy Emmett?"

Edward looked thoughtful, then. "No, he wasn't lying. I don't know. Maybe…" he trailed off.

"Maybe what I feel around you overshadows everything else?" I suggested.

He nodded, happier to hear me say it myself. "I certainly feel that way," he said. He took my hand between his two cool ones. I wondered what he had done during my long sleep. He'd probably had enough time to clean the house, read "Infinite Jest," independently prove Fermat's Last Theorem, and take down a deer or two on a run to Maine.

"Sorry I slept so long," I said. "What did you do all that time?"

He looked a little sheepish. "I thought about the Mariners _a lot._ And Rosalie and Emmett came over and we played Mortal Kombat for a long time. They just left."

I giggled at the contrast between how I imagined his morning and what he actually did. When I explained my fit of laughter, he smiled and said, "Actually, we did spend some time once working on the question of the Cullen numbers."

"Which are?"

"A set of rare numbers that are the result of a complicated equation. It has nothing to do with us, but the name intrigued us when Jasper came across in a list of unresolved math questions. The question is whether there is an infinite number of Cullen numbers that are prime. Do you remember what a prime number is?" he asked.

I threw his pillow at him.

"I just know that trig wasn't your favorite subject," he said, teasing. "Anyway, it took us a while to work it out."

"What is the answer?"

"Infinite. Which is a satisfying result for someone who thinks about eternity. Maybe that's why a human hasn't solved it yet."

"So you mean that you have the answer, but some poor math professor somewhere is still racking her brains over the Cullen primes? Isn't that sort of … cruel?"

"If we'd discovered the next generation of antibiotics and didn't tell anyone, that would be cruel. But giving the answer to a math problem? That would be like us going around the world and solving all those hopelessly mangled Rubik's cubes. The sum of human happiness wouldn't increase."

I could see his point. "You certainly weren't adjusting Rubik's cubes this morning," I snorted. "Do all vampires like video games?"

"All the Cullens do. Esme is a real killer at Grand Theft Auto."

"Really?" I couldn't imagine that, but hey, maybe Esme was hiding a lot of aggression behind her sweet ingenue's face. I tried to picture her whooping as she gunned down rival drug dealers.

"No, not really." Edward burst my bubble. "She wouldn't be able to abide the profanity."

"How does she abide Emmett, then?"

"It does try her patience."

"Did Rosalie win again this morning?"

"Yes, she creamed us."

I pulled my hand from Edward's so I could stretch. He shifted on the bed as he watched. "Do you let her, to make your life easier?" I asked.

"No, she naturally seems to have good luck. She's the polar opposite of you."

"I had good luck for the most important thing," I said softly. He shook his head at me.

"It was Fate," he declared.

_Biochemistry,_ I thought.

He took my hand back and said, "Bella, last night was extraordinary… You were so unhurried. You didn't seem worried."

"Worried?"

"We are so frantic together when we make love – and it's not just because you have frustrations from months of waiting, and I have frustrations from decades… well, I thought I'd known decades of frustration, but then I met you and discovered the true meaning of the word. I have a hard time believing that this – " he glided his hand through the air toward me, "won't be snatched away from me. Especially," he added wryly, "when so many people have tried to do precisely that."

He was right. I felt the same way.

"But last night was a lesson for us," he said. "I touched you for hours, and you touched me, and it's just as fascinating at the end as at the beginning. I may be new at this, but I do have a bit of stamina -" he smiled then, and added, "- and when I don't, my recovery time is pretty respectable."

"As I well know."

His face became more serious. "We may have a deadline for your change," he said. "I am all too aware of that. But we don't have to have one in bed."

We were silent for a while.

"I do know what you mean," I said eventually. "But it's hard for me too, to believe that my danger magnet isn't attracting unwelcome attention. Or that …" This part was hard for me to say, especially since I was hiding something from him now because of my residual fear that he would disappear. "That you'll find you need to leave. I'm working on it."

He nodded. "I know that's my fault. But you will realize one day that you don't have to rush. I'm not going anywhere, truly."

Then he kissed my afternoon-breath mouth as if it was the most delicious thing in the world.

_A/N: Let's talk about periods, shall we? I'm all in favor of period sex, and some fic writers have done great period sex involving vampire Edward (as in "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which, fabulously, has Bella using a Keeper), but I just couldn't see my version of him being willing to do it - he's not uptight sexually, but he is uptight about Bella's safety. Also, when I was 19, I had my period every three months, so stretching Bella's cycle out to two seemed both reasonable and a way to reduce Edward's agony._

_The song Bella hears at Fenwick is by West Indian Girl, which should give you a hint about the chapter title. The next title should be CDG, because I really want to get these two out of Hanover._

_Food notes: Rosalie may well have had brownies as a human, but it's not something she'd remember, is it? And when I've had alligator, it's tasted better than chicken, but then I don't much like chicken._

_My profile page now has links to some of the art mentioned. _

_As always, thanks for reviewing. And if I need to explain something, please let me know._


	11. Chapter 11: CDG

_Disclaimer: Twilight's characters aren't mine._

_I'm going on a giant nostalgia trip in this chapter. You have been warned._

* * *

Ch. 11: CDG

"Wait a minute," Edward said quietly, pulling me into the shadow of a tree. It was a chilly Thursday evening, and we had been walking along the back of the frat houses on Choate Road to Professor Yefimov's house - he was hosting a get-together meant for his Russian studies seniors, but had, exceptionally, invited Edward.

"We need to go inside behind that group," he said. A handful of students were on the other side of the street, walking toward the professor's substantial 1920's red-brick house.

"Why?" I asked.

"Professor Yefimov has a dog," he said as we watched the group start to head up the walkway to the white portico of the house. "Dogs don't have a good reaction to me. And I'm sorry to tell you, they probably won't have good one to you, either, because you smell like me."

"That's too bad. Dogs have always liked me."

"_I know_."

We trailed into the house behind four tall guys in puffy jackets, and as Edward had known, there was a dog. A giant white one that looked like a greyhound with hair and snarled and bared its teeth at the newcomers, who recoiled and blocked my view, stepping back into me. Edward gently grasped my shoulders to steady me.

"Down, boy!" a voice belonging to a woman hidden by the group in front of me reprimanded the dog, which continued to snarl until she apparently grabbed his collar and pulled him away. There was a "Holy shit, did you see that?" from one of the spooked students.

"Does it hunt vampires?" I whispered to Edward, remembering the title of the other course Professor Yefimov taught: Vampires, Witches and Werewolves in Russian Folklore.

"No, but borzoi do hunt wolves," he answered, a trace of satisfaction in his voice.

The dog banished, we walked into the quiet hum of the living room, whose walls were lined with groaning bookshelves interrupted by Soviet propaganda paintings of happy collective farmers and stalwart factory workers. Edward introduced me to some of the other students from his class, all seniors who acknowledged me with the looks of surprise and speculation I had become used to from strangers who saw me with my husband_. I'm right there with you,_ I thought as they resumed their discussion of grad school and State Department fellowships.

"Edward," called out a man with impressive mane of silver-streaked hair who stepped up to our cluster. "I'm so glad you could make it."

"Bella, this is my professor, Evgeny Yefimov," Edward said as we turned to greet the man, who was suitably attired in a tweed jacket – maybe there was some sort of Ivy League dress code for drinks parties. "My wife, Bella Cullen."

Professor Yefimov pressed a glass of vodka into Edward's hand, then shook mine. "A pleasure to meet you. Now I know whom Edward is daydreaming about in class," he said gallantly in his mellifluous accent.

"I'm quite sure that you'll never catch Edward daydreaming in your class," I answered as Yefimov handed me a glass as well. I was sure that only Edward had caught my extremely slight emphasis on the operative verb in that sentence.

"Do you speak Russian too, Bella?" the professor asked.

"Sorry," I said. "Edward is the one with the, uh, talented mouth in the house." Edward coughed as he was holding the rim of his glass to his lips for a fake sip, and Professor Yefimov smiled widely.

"Careful, you may need to take that slowly," he said, but Edward, instead of taking advantage of his out, shook his head and tossed back his vodka without wincing. Guys.

"Excellent," Yefimov said, and crooked a finger at another older man with a similarly impressive mane and tweed jacket, this one with patches on the elbows. "Edward, I'd love to introduce you to someone."

The man taught at Middlebury, and the three of them launched into a discussion about vanished and disappearing Northern Russian dialects that veered between Russian and English and left me out, though listening to Edward speak Russian was a pretty sensual experience. I took a small sip of vodka, and not needing to prove my manliness, shuddered as it hit my throat.

I mouthed at Edward, "Stay here," then slipped away to see if there was anything else to drink. What I found, though, was a table with a brass samovar and several bottles of vodka, and nothing else.

"Not a fan of vodka?" asked a voice next to me as I stared at the table. I turned to see a young woman about my age and almost as pale but taller and much prettier, with sleek light brown hair and hooded blue eyes.

"I'm not ready for it straight," I confessed. "I was hoping there might be tonic."

"Tonic is sacrilege in this house, I'm afraid," she said. "By the way, I'm Evgeny's daughter, Lonnie." Lonnie moved from a Russian lilt as she said her father's name to unaccented American as she said her own, and I realized she must have been the woman who had pulled the dog away.

"Um, I'm Bella Cullen, and I'm not in your dad's class, but my husband is," I said, nodding toward Edward on the other side of the room. He turned his head to me as I spoke, and winked.

"Oh, _yeah_," she said, drawing it out, as if she knew exactly who Edward was, but before I could ask she went on, "Would you like a glass of wine instead? We have some in the kitchen."

I nodded and followed Lonnie through a hallway and into the spacious cream-painted kitchen in the back of the house.

"Dartmouth has nice faculty housing," I observed as Lonnie bent down to reach into a wine refrigerator.

"Oh, no, we have this because my mother helps manage the endowment." Lonnie uncorked a bottle of red and poured it into two glasses. "Here you go," she said, handing me one.

"So, you know Edward?" I asked cautiously after tipping my glass to her in thanks.

"I've heard of him. My father is fascinated by his Russian," Lonnie said, leaning against a counter, slumping a bit; maybe she was uncomfortable about her height. "Papa says he uses words that long ago became archaic."

Crap. "Hmm, I think he learned from a, uh, very old relative," I stuttered. "But I don't know the details. He's very good with languages." _Including some probably not taught at any university in the world._

"I imagine Papa is trying yet again to figure it out," she said, and I shrugged to hide my relief. That explained the conversation about dialects, though Yefimov's earlier inquisitions must not have been worrisome if Edward was willing to attend this party.

"You're a freshman too, right?" Lonnie went on. "You're in psychology class with me."

"It's such a big class," I said. "I'm surprised you noticed me."

"Oh, my friend Max stares at you the whole time, so I couldn't help see you. He thinks you're pretty. But –" she said in sudden embarrassment – "if you meet him, don't tell him I told you that. I can't believe I vomited that out like that."

"Don't worry, I'll keep your secret. I'm good at that," I reassured her, even as I wondered why Max would be watching me when a woman who looked like a princess in a Russian fairy tale was sitting next to him. I hoped this wasn't another Jessica moping over Mike moping over me situation, because I really didn't need to relive that part of high school.

The giant dog whimpered unhappily out in the back garden, sensing the vampire scent too close to his mistress.

"Sorry about the dog," Lonnie said. "I don't know what's up with him. He's usually much better behaved — I wonder who's here who's bothering him."

"What's his name?" I asked to distract her, and took a sip.

"Vlad," she answered, and I coughed on my drink; the Cullens weren't doing well with alcohol tonight. "My father hates Vladimir Putin."

Thank goodness. "Is Lonnie short for something, too?" I asked. The plainness of her name made for an odd contrast with her exotic looks.

"Svetlana, a name impossible to live up to here. It makes Americans think of femmes fatales."

"You could absolutely carry it off."

She frowned and shook her head. "What about you? You didn't want to keep your maiden name?"

In other circumstances, I would have, or hyphenated …well, come to think of it, not if I'd ever married Jacob, and if I'd taken just his name I'd have sounded like a horse …. But I knew I'd probably be a Swan again one day – in fact, I'd have to be a Swan again one day - so it didn't seem important. Not that I could tell her that.

"I also have a name that's hard to live up to, and getting married gave me an excuse to get rid of it," I answered.

"What was it?"

I grinned at her. "Now that I'm married, I don't have to tell anyone."

Lonnie tried a few more times to get it out of me, but I deflected her questions, remembering Edward's advice. She wasn't obnoxious about it, though, and we ended up sitting at the breakfast table in a corner of the kitchen, the bottle of wine emptying between us, Vlad's moans and bursts of laughter and jazz from the living room a background to our conversation. Thanks to her mother's job, Lonnie attended Dartmouth tuition-free, and even had a dorm room, but, she admitted, she probably spent more time at home than she should, so she felt a little out of the college mainstream – something we had in common. I also figured out that she had absolutely no romantic interest in my across-the-room admirer, and I was grateful.

She and I were arranging to go to some of our mandatory grad student psych experiments together – when given a choice between a date in the sauna and a date in the psych lab, the former won out, so I was a bit behind on meeting my class requirement – when Edward appeared. I looked up to see him leaning his shoulder against the doorway of the kitchen, and I sighed in tipsy contemplation of his face, of his neck, of his torso narrowing into his jeans….

"Heyyyyy, babe," he said, slurring his words slightly and forcing me into a fit of giggles. "I'm beat – are you ready to go?"

"Uh, sure," I said, uncertain why he needed to act drunk, but playing along. As Vlad's moans sharpened into yelps of fear for his owner, Edward came into the kitchen and took my hand to help me from my chair a little clumsily, and Lonnie smirked at me. I introduced her to him, and he flinched a little when I did, and I asked in feigned worry, "Should we get a taxi home? I'm not sure either of us should be driving."

He narrowed his eyes at me, but said without missing a beat, "I've already ordered one. It'll be at the corner in five minutes."

We gathered up our coats and said our goodbyes to Lonnie and her father, who smiled indulgently at plastered Edward, and made our way out.

"You seemed a little wary of Lonnie," I said when we were outside and Edward was perfectly sober again. That was not something that could be said of me, and he wrapped an arm around my waist as I stumbled on a dip in the sidewalk.

"No. She's a smart girl - she thinks you're kind and amusing, and that I'm completely smitten, which is all true. It was her name. I knew a Lonnie once, and I didn't like him." He sighed at my tacit question. "He was the ringleader in Port Angeles … when you got lost."

"Wow," I mumbled. We hadn't really ever talked thoroughly about that episode, which had been eclipsed by so many other events and nearer death experiences in the last year and a half. "That seems like so long ago."

"It seems like yesterday to me," he said, his voice taking on an echo of the rage it had that night.

"Shhh," I said, tugging at his hand for him to stop. "It was long ago and far away."

He turned to face me and I rose on my tiptoes to reach his lips. "Mmm, vodka tastes much better mixed with you than straight," I said dreamily, and his lips curved.

"And cabernet mixed with Bella tastes nice, but I prefer straight Bella," he teased. "No, wait, drunken Bella is rather delicious too, I remember."

"Speaking of drunks, why were you?" I asked rather nonsensically, but he understood.

"I drank enough shots that they should have had some obvious effect on a 19-year-old," he said, and grimaced. "I'm going to need a vampire moment."

"Do you usually go to things like this in college?" He certainly didn't in high school.

"No."

"So you're doing this for my benefit?"

"No, for my own. I haven't bothered getting to know people, because there isn't much of a future in it – it's not as if we're going to be attending our 20th reunion at Forks High. But if I'm going to try to live alongside humans, I'm beginning to think that I shouldn't cut myself off so much; I should be more like Carlisle. After all, you were worth getting to know." He paused. "I don't know if getting to know other humans is worth drinking vodka, though." He grimaced again.

"I liked getting to know Lonnie. Oh, oh, oh!" I said, suddenly remembering, and Edward looked amused at my outburst. "Why did you say on the first day of class that I shouldn't tell anyone my maiden name?" I asked.

He tilted his head and looked down at me. "Aren't you cold?" he asked. "Let's get you to the car."

"Edward…" I whined, but I started walking again.

"I could tell you now, but I'd prefer to show you later."

I was immediately suspicious. "Is it dangerous?" I asked. I had really resented it when Edward had spirited me off to Jacksonville so I wouldn't find out about Victoria on the prowl.

"No," he said instantly.

"Is it something that I'll find embarrassing?"

He sounded thoughtful. "I don't know if you will love it, but it's not embarrassing. In fact, it's rather a rite of passage in the family, just one that's happening earlier for you than it did for the rest of us. Can you bear to wait?"

"I suppose," I said reluctantly. "But I reserve the right to tie you up and punish you later." Yes, the paraphilia unit in psych class had been eye-opening in some respects.

"Oh," he said, stopping short, then giving me a lazy smile. "Maybe I'll be able to make it so I can show you sooner rather than later."

* * *

"What would you think of going to Paris for the Thanksgiving break?" Edward asked a few nights later as we sat opposite each other at the dining room table. I was taking notes on "Vanity Fair" and propping my bare feet on his shins until the cold penetrated my soles, and stealing peeks at him as he wrote a letter – an actual letter! on paper, with a fountain pen! – to Esme. "We have the week off, and Alice says Jacksonville will be sunny the whole time. But Paris – few places are as gray and dark as Paris in November."

"With that kind of sales pitch, how could I resist?" I said, trying to be blasé, but my God, yes. I had always wanted to go. I had been a sucker for the "Madeline" books.

"I hear the food's decent, too," he added.

Mmm. I'd had some great meals in Montreal, but having foie gras in France sounded awfully appealing. Besides, I wasn't sure I was up to a repeat visit to Renee so soon. I loved seeing my mother, but it was almost as if monitoring my marriage was her latest hobby, so she was full of innocent comments that turned out not to be so innocent. When she wasn't asking leading questions, Edward had her reminiscing about my childhood, and I couldn't complain because I knew he was storing up her words and thoughts for me later. (He shot me occasional appalled looks when her stories involved my negotiating payment plans with the utility company, even though I assured him later that I'd found my talks with Arizona Public Service empowering rather than traumatic, and that I was rarely in danger of hypothermia in Phoenix.) And our efforts at silent sex weren't all that successful …well, at the silent part; Renee's winks at me in the mornings were proof of that. They were also not nearly as embarrassing as I would have feared, a rather liberating discovery.

Still, I'd happily skip turkey in Jacksonville.

"Would we all go to Paris?" I asked.

"I think so, and Esme and Carlisle too. They miss us, and it'd give them a convenient excuse to decline Thanksgiving invitations from Carlisle's colleagues."

My cell buzzed then, and I got up to fetch it from the kitchen. A rare call from Charlie's number. I unplugged the phone from the charger and greeted him.

"Hey, Bells, what are you up to?" he asked. I could hear the familiar, faint sounds of a football game in the background. Maybe the Seahawks were getting massacred.

"Homework. I live an exciting life."

"Yeah, know what you mean," my father drawled. He paused for a long moment and I waited; Charlie had never been one to feel the need to fill conversational gaps, but this one made me suspicious.

"Listen," Charlie said at last, "I finally saw Jacob, over in La Push, at Sue's place."

"Oh. Is he back in school?" I asked as neutrally as possible.

"Nah, and I gave him a good talking to about that. He asked about you, asked if we talked much. And he seemed really down … he looked like someone had just kicked his puppy or something. I'm sure it'd make him feel better to talk to you."

I heard a soft thud in the dining room, and I wandered in from the kitchen to see Edward with his forehead on the table, his response to Charlie's unwitting joke.

"I'm sorry to hear that, but I don't want to call him if he isn't ready for it," I said carefully.

"Yeah…. Um, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?" he asked.

I felt instantly guilty. "Esme and Carlisle are coming out here to see all the kids," I said, deciding he didn't need to know about the second leg of their trip.

"Oh," he said a little wistfully. "That sounds nice. It's great Carlisle can get the time off. I'm going to Sue's, so I bet I'll see Jacob again then." His voice took on a more hopeful tinge. "I'll tell him you told him to call you."

I didn't bother to correct Charlie. I'd be dashing his hopes permanently soon enough.

* * *

All the Cullens did want to go. We met Esme and Carlisle at Logan, and there were squeals and kisses all around, and some gentle hugs for me, as the family reunited. It felt so long since I'd seen my parents-in-law; I noticed with a pang that I probably didn't miss Charlie and Renee as much as I missed them.

I surprised Carlisle giving me a clinical look, assessing my health, and I frowned at him. I looked up at Edward to find him staring at Carlisle too. _Oh._ "Don't forget doctor-patient confidentiality," I grumbled.

"Forgive me, it's still a relatively new experience to have a child whose physical health I have to worry about," Carlisle said with a soft laugh.

"You don't have to worry about it," I muttered, but even as I said it, I knew that I had to figure out a way to have a private conversation with the only doctor I could ask for a diagnosis. My episodes didn't seem to be worsening, and they still eased with Edward's touch. But they weren't going away either.

The sky was safely overcast when we arrived at Charles de Gaulle, though it was still bright enough that I had to blink when I looked through the plate glass windows of the terminal on the way to passport control, a little nervous even though my new passport with my new name was completely legitimate, unlike the rest of the Cullens'. But I was surprisingly well rested. Edward had encouraged me to go to sleep as soon as the plane left Boston, singing to me in a hypnotic whisper, and fending off the flight attendants' efforts to disturb me until the plane was almost ready to touch down. Being able to stretch out full length didn't hurt either, though I was sorry that a stupid console — shades of the Volvo —prevented me from curling up against my husband.

Once we'd been scrutinized and retrieved our luggage, Alice opened her trunk and whipped out a long coat in chocolate-brown cashmere. "To replace that parka," she said, tapping her foot until I removed the offending garment.

"What, no mink?" I sniped as she shrugged the new coat onto my shoulders.

She turned me around and looked stern. "Of course not. You're much too young for a mink – you'd look like somebody's mistress, and Edward is much too young himself to keep a mistress," she told me in all seriousness.

I goggled at her. "What century are you from?"

"Same as you, young miss, and don't you forget it. Well, what do you think?" she demanded, twirling her finger and then pointing at the coat.

I spun around in it - it was tailored to nip in my waist and subtly flare out below and it was both light and warm. "It's gorgeous, of course," I said. "Thank you, Alice. But I'm not convinced about the mink," I added to tease her. Esme and Rosalie shook their heads at me, and assured me that Alice was right. Even the men seemed to agree.

A trio of Mercedeses with dark-tinted windows awaited us by the curb outside arrivals, the keys held by a lugubrious middle-aged man in an ill-fitting suit who dropped them into Esme's hand with a gusty sigh and then disappeared into the terminal. Apparently no Cullen liked taxis. But instead of hopping into them to drive into the city, the Cullens had a sudden conversation that was too low and fast for me to follow, and which ended in Alice and Jasper taking off in one of the cars on their own.

"Uh, someone want to fill me in?" I asked.

Edward was apologetic. "Alice saw that the concierge where we're staying was going to have a breakdown if we all showed up at once," he explained.

"You do seem to have that effect on people," I agreed.

"So Alice and Jasper are going ahead so she's not overwhelmed by all of us, and Jasper can calm her down."

"Wouldn't you and I have been more reassuring? No one's going to think I'm anything special," I said, looking down at the slice of the wrinkled shirt visible between the lapels of my new coat. That T-shirt and my yoga pants made up my only Bella outfit on this trip. Unsure about what would be appropriate for Paris, I had ceded control of the rest of my wardrobe to Alice.

"She has a good point," Emmett said. Carlisle and Esme nodded.

"But she looks about 15 right now," Rosalie said. Ah, my bitchy sister was back. "The concierge wouldn't want to hand over the keys to a pair of teenagers."

I decided to ignore her. "Umm, so do we have time to go to the bookstore in the terminal?" I asked Edward.

We went inside to a little shop I'd noticed with newspapers and magazines and books and "j'heart Paris" T-shirts. I briefly decided to buy one just to make Alice shriek in disapproval. Edward started leafing through a copy of Le Monde, and I went to a rack of English-language books. After a few minutes, he came to stand next to me.

"You don't need that," he nodded toward the Paris guidebook I was flipping through. "I've got it all up here." He scratched his temple.

"I know, but how do you know what I'd want to see?" I said. I stopped at a page in the museums section. "Maybe I'd like to see the … Musée Grevin? But I wouldn't know that I did if I didn't know it's here."

"You really want to go to a wax museum?"

"No, but now I know there's one here I don't want to see." I didn't want him to make all my decisions for me. I took my guidebook over to the cashier's, and Edward followed. I handed the book to the young woman in the headscarf at the register, then froze in realization.

"Oh, I don't have any money," I said in apology, turning to Edward.

"You do – any of your cards will work here," he replied. "But this is best," he added, handing me a plastic card emblazoned Carte Bleue that he'd slipped out of his pocket without my noticing. "It's tied to our euro accounts."

_Our euro accounts._ Of course. When it came time to put in the PIN, I turned again to Edward. "Zero eight one three," he told me. He added, teasing: "Do you think you can remember it?"

"Um, Aug. 13? Did something important happen that day?"

"Mariners beat the A's, 2-1."

"Oh, yeah, that's right." It probably was. "I should be able to remember _that _momentous occasion_."_

He grinned at me as the cashier handed me a bag with my book and his paper and we left the store.

When we arrived at the 19th-century apartment building on the Place des Etats-Unis, Alice and Jasper were waiting for us instead of a dazed concierge. There was a small flat silver panel with buttons on the side of the entrance that Edward said was the digicode to open the door when the concierge, Mme Douzy, wasn't around. He showed me how to punch in the numbers, but I immediately forgot the code. We were staying on the fourth floor by ourselves, while the rest of the family was sharing a much grander apartment two stories down. I wasn't sure that was far enough away, but I didn't say anything.

I had to speak when we stepped into our apartment, though. "Edward - it's like a movie set!" I breathed when I saw the chevron floors and the alabaster mantels of the dining room and the salon. The furniture was old-fashioned and delicate, copies from one of the Louis, I supposed; gilt and white paneling punctuated by small, dark landscapes in heavy gold frames covered the walls. We stepped through a French window onto a little balcony that overlooked the strip of park that was the Square Thomas Jefferson. "All that's missing is a view of the Eiffel Tower."

"My apologies," he said silkily. "Here, come see the bedroom." He led me through the salon to another room.

"Oh, I see, it's in _here_," I said, laughing. There indeed was the tower framed in the tall windows that flanked the bed. Alice had already been here, I could see, because there was an outfit laid out for me on a slipper chair: narrow black trousers, a garnet cashmere tunic, a silk scarf decorated with saddles and bits. "Wow," I said inadequately, looking around as Edward brought in our luggage. I bounced experimentally on the bed a few times. It squeaked.

"I'm going to have to repair that," Edward muttered, dropping our bags in an empty corner. "Shall we go get you something for breakfast at the market?" he asked, but I suspected that that wasn't what he really wanted to do first.

"Um, could I take a shower before - wash the airplane off?" I asked.

His face brightened. "Do you want company?"

"Hmm, let me think," I teased, tapping my chin. After so many hours of chastity, I imagined that he was eager to get my clothes off; hell, I was eager to get his clothes off. "Oh, all right," I sighed dramatically.

It was a very hot shower.

* * *

The market was a collection of stalls and stores along a cobblestone street a few blocks away. Because it was November, there wasn't much fruit, mostly apples, pears and clementines, but there was an astonishing range of mushrooms – black trompettes de la mort, giant cepes, pieds de mouton, and the mushroom I recognized from home, here called champignons de Paris. We got baguettes that were still warm, and bought salty butter and cheese. Edward even had a lengthy conversation with the elderly fromagère about which cheeses were best; she would slice pieces for him to try, which he palmed and then discreetly passed on to me to taste, watching my reaction closely.

"I bet you've never had such a long discussion about food before," I remarked as we walked back to the apartment.

"No, but it was interesting because she's so passionate about … well, something I find inherently distasteful."

"Because there's cheese on pizza." He and Krissy had something in common.

"Don't remind me. Anyway, she's also sad – her business is dropping off, because people don't go to the market as much as they used to; they go to big grocery stores in the suburbs to save money. So she deals more and more with foreigners like me."

"She knew you were a foreigner?" I was surprised. I had figured that his accent would fool any native.

"Yes. I'm clueless about cheese."

After breakfast, Edward showed me the apartment where the rest of the family was staying. It was much more lavish than our own, taking up the entire story, an enfilade of rooms with parquet de Versailles floors and exposures on both sides that terminated in two bedrooms on each end, the ceilings even higher, the moldings much more elaborate, and the paintings mostly large abstracts that should have clashed with the traditional décor of the rooms, but didn't – I didn't recognize them, though they all seemed vaguely familiar. In any case, I couldn't imagine that there would be valuable paintings in a rental apartment.

Despite all its luxuriousness, it didn't, as Edward pointed out smugly, have a view of the tower. It was also empty.

"Is everyone out sightseeing? Shopping?" I asked when we had returned to the salon and we were standing by one of the French windows, which opened onto a long terrace looking over the square. My eyes weren't on the park, though, because Edward in this setting looked so different and so knee-weakening – not like an American college student, but perhaps the slightly dissolute younger son of an aristocratic European family that had enough money to marry for looks and brains, wearing black trousers and a snowy white shirt under a caramel-colored, discreetly velvet blazer that made his eyes glow.

Edward hesitated, and stared through the glass before turning to face me. "Calling on old acquaintances," he said finally.

Oh. I bet they _were _old. "Old acquaintances I shouldn't meet, I take it?"

"There's no need for you to meet them in person, fortunately," he said. "Enguerrand and Marie have been residing and … dining here since the Black Death, and it's best to tell them we're here with a human so they and any associates they have at the moment don't feel territorial."

"Why do you seem worried?"

"Carlisle has some concern about visiting them I can't discern, something besides their usual irritated reaction to his proselytizing for vegetarianism." He shrugged, and then grinned. "Enguerrand and Marie are very… earthy_,_ so perhaps he's just bracing for their questions about us."

I flinched, remembering the venom conference call, and Edward reacted immediately to my expression. "Carlisle would never say anything," he reassured me. "None of them will. And who knows? Our marriage may be a bigger testament to the benefits of vegetarianism than any moral argument that Carlisle can muster. " He was so adorable in his total – and misplaced - confidence that other vampires would envy him _me_ that I had to smile at him. "And then, while everyone else goes to Christie's to look at some lots, Carlisle and Rosalie are visiting Maisons-Alfort to check on an investment."

"Carlisle? I didn't know he took an interest in finances."

"He doesn't. It's a biotechnology startup, doing promising research on a treatment for Chagas disease, which –" he answered my look "- fittingly for us, is spread by a bloodsucking insect in South America. It's deadlier than malaria there."

"So you actually _are _looking for the next generation of antibiotics, in a way."

"You always think the best of us," he said, shaking his head. "Carlisle's interest is genuinely altruistic. But I also think we could make quite a bit of money if what the researchers discover can be applied to other, more profitable diseases. And Rosalie … well, Rosalie couldn't care less about helping the Guarani fight Chagas disease. She thinks this sort of research could lead to finding a way to reverse the effects of venom."

I wondered, as I had before, how Rosalie could so fervently want something that would eventually separate her from Emmett, and how Emmett felt about that. I tried to imagine Edward as a human, vulnerable to accident and disease, and my stomach clenched. Emmett would feel that way, too.

"Bella?"

"I'm just trying to picture it. How do Carlisle and Rosalie present themselves?"

"Carlisle is what he is, a doctor with lots of money to invest, and Rose is his scientific adviser and inspiration - that is, inspiration to the scientists there. A breathing version of Emma Frost who's an expert on enzymes in the kissing bug. She makes quite an impression in her glasses and lab coat."

"The kissing bug?"

"Yes, the kissing bug comes to you in your sleep … and attacks," he said softly, making infection with a deadly illness sound incredibly, inappropriately, alluring, because he was leaning over and lowering his lips to my jaw.

"If it attacks like this, I don't mind," I murmured, leaning back against the door jamb for support. "Uh, Edward," I said, as he moved to that spot under my right ear, "do _you_ kiss me while I'm asleep?"

He stopped still then, as if he'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. An inapt image, that.

"Edward?" I asked again.

He exhaled, his breath wafting into my hair, and inhaled before answering. "I do," he admitted softly, moving to my earlobe.

"Oh," I moaned a bit. "Where?"

"Here," he pulled at the lobe gently with his lips. "And here and here," he dropped down to brush my collarbone through my sweater and then kissed my shoulder. "And your neck," he said, untying my clumsily knotted scarf and pulling it off. "Why would Alice want you to cover your neck?" he asked before he bent his head and started sucking at the skin there, more forcefully than he ever had before. My God, that felt beyond amazing, cold and wet and hot all at once. I moaned again and my bones melted so that only Edward's arms kept me upright. If I could have controlled my limbs I would have ripped off the buttons of his undoubtedly expensive shirt.

There was a soft pop as he pulled his mouth from my skin.

"But never your lips," he went on, his voice rough, and kissed the tip of my nose. "I don't want to wake you up."

"You can wake me up if you need to," I whispered shakily, and opened my eyes to see dark gold gleaming at me.

"Don't say that, baby," he responded, leaning down again. "If you give me permission to do that, you'll never sleep."

* * *

We finally tore ourselves away from the apartment and walked to the Iéna Métro station, passing block after block of 19th-century buildings like our own, with wrought iron balconies and tan and cream stone facades. Edward led me to an automated photo booth with a short black curtain like the one on the boardwalk in Port Angeles. We needed pictures for our train passes, and the booth offered four poses for three euros. I was expecting horrible results, but my black and white photo was surprisingly flattering. Edward, naturally, unnaturally, looked ethereal in his.

It occurred to me as we waited for our photos to develop that we hadn't brought a camera with us on this trip, nor had I ever seen a Cullen with one. Alice didn't arrange for a photographer at the wedding, and I suspected that in the pictures our guests took, Edward usually had his face buried in my hair. The Cullens weren't in the high school yearbook (though there was a hideous picture of me) and they had no photos of themselves on display in the Forks house.

"Photo are a bit like Dorian Gray's picture," he said when I asked. "They get foxed and torn and faded... and we don't. So it's smarter to avoid them if we can – that's why so many of our wedding guests found that their cellphone cameras had somehow malfunctioned." He paused, then tugged at my hand. "Come on, that doesn't mean we can't take a photograph of us now," he said, pulling me into the booth with him.

He sat me on his lap, and pushed the button to start the camera. I stared into the lens, but just before the flash popped, Edward turned his head to kiss my jaw. _Flash._ My temple. _Flash_. My earlobe. _Flash_. The hollow under my ear. _Flash._

I glared at him. He shrugged, unapologetic. "I didn't get to watch your face when I did that earlier," he explained. "This is my chance to see it."

"I get a turn," I said. He nodded. I realized that I was going to have to be much bolder if I wanted to elicit a real reaction from him.

I started off slowly. When the machine whirred, I swirled the point of my tongue around his ear. _Flash._ I scraped my teeth down his neck. _Flash._ I scratched his nipple. _Flash._ I stroked his crotch.

I blinked to clear my eyes of the aftereffects of the flashes and then saw that he was gazing at me, a curious mix of emotions on his face.

"What is it?"

"I've given you a love bite."

"A what?"

His fingers traced a cool circle on my neck under my scarf and I understood. I pulled away the silk and examined my neck in the mirror next to the camera. A faint mark was visible, and I knew it would deepen as the hours passed.

"You gave me a hickey!" I said gleefully. "_That's_ what the scarf's for."

We stepped out of the booth to wait for our new batches of photos, and Edward silently arranged my scarf so it hid my mark completely, tying a smooth knot and tucking in the ends. I looked at him and thought.

"You know, it didn't hurt _at all,_ when you did that," I said finally. "In fact, I'd like you to do it as much as possible."

He sighed. "Thank you," he said, and I smiled at hearing that he believed me this time. "I enjoyed it myself … and I'm pleased with myself that I could … but I'm conflicted. I truly wish you didn't have to hide your neck. I miss it."

"Alice will have concealer, I bet," I said. She seemed to have a professional makeup artist's collection of bottles and brushes, even if all she ever wore was blush.

Edward still looked a little regretful. "I'll take it off at bedtime," I promised.

There was a beep then to indicate that the pictures were ready. Our two sets had some similarities: the victim in blissful shock, the perpetrator looking mischievous. I was fascinated by Edward's face, his mask of control slipping. He seemed equally, if inexplicably, entranced by my captured expressions.

After a while, he turned and raised an eyebrow at me. "What I did was romantic," he said. "What you did was obscene."

"Hey, they're just headshots."

"She said, "head,'" he muttered. I snickered. Beavis.

He used his thumbnail to separate the photos we needed for the Métro. I was about to tease him for his supernatural scissoring skills when the realization hit me.

"We're going to have to destroy all these," I said quietly.

He nodded. "But not for a while," he said. "Not until you can remember them."

* * *

Our first stop was a department store near the old Opéra, where we bought couvertures chauffantes to fill in for our American electric blankets, and I gaped at an astonishing, and somewhat scarily ponderous, Art Nouveau stained glass cupola that was the highlight of the store's architecture - I was a long way from the Macy's in Phoenix.

Edward refused to have the blankets delivered, considering the dire consequences if something went awry, and the guard at our next destination gave the oversized shopping bag a puzzled look as he allowed us into the Palais de Justice complex so we could visit the Sainte-Chapelle.

St. Louis's 13th-century jewel of a building had to be one of the most sublime things I'd ever seen. Even under a gray sky, the chapel was suffused by the blues and reds of the tall windows, hiding the bit of wall separating them. It was like being in a stained-glass box.

As I looked at a stained-glass sequence depicting the blood-spouting martyrdom of a saint I didn't recognize, Edward murmured in my ear, "Apparently, it's even more spectacular on a sunny day." I heard the note of regret in his voice, and spun to face him.

"Don't," I said. "There is no better place for me than with you, right here, right now." I stared at him in reproof, and his face softened. I thought of our purchase earlier, and decided to modify my statement. "Unless I could be with you somewhere right now in that electric blanket," I whispered.

"Bella," he said almost inaudibly, and pulled me closer so he could kiss me for perhaps longer than was polite in even a deconsecrated church. When we broke apart, I saw that we had diverted the attention of many of the German retirees around us from the windows, and I flushed and stared at my feet as we left.

"Don't be embarrassed," he told me after we descended the stairs of the chapel to the courtyard. "Everyone was either envious or nostalgic. Only one woman thought we should enjoy it while it lasted … and she doesn't know that it's going to last for far longer than she could ever imagine."

We left the Palais de Justice and headed across the plaza to the recently scrubbed grandeur of Notre Dame, which we were going to study soon in art history; we'd just finished the Romanesque period. The space was so full of people on this gloomy, damp November day that I shuddered to think how oppressive the crowds must be in summer.

I automatically started to follow the stream of tourists pushing inside the doors of the right portal, but Edward urged me, "Stop for a moment. The outside may be the best part."

We stepped aside from the entryway so I could stare at the time-eroded and much-restored stone saints, kings and animals ornamenting the facade. Kate and Tanya had already been around at least a century before they were sculptured, I thought. There was a Death of the Virgin on the left, and a Madonna Enthroned on the right, and in the middle a Last Judgment with the damned tied up and being shuffled off to Hell by demons.

"Look to the right of the damned," he said. "There I am." I focused on where he was pointing, the curlicues and arabesques of fantastical creatures, naked and writhing on the archivolts of the portal above a row of apostles. It took a while before I could pick out the fangs and the claws of the emaciated figure he meant, hunched over an unfortunate sinner.

"But it has horns," I objected.

He shrugged. "In Hell, I have horns."

I stared at him, unconvinced, and saw his mouth twitch. Good, he was joking.

"Are you sure you aren't the demon with the paunch and the moobs?" I said, pointing to a sculpture in the same row that reminded me of "Where the Wild Things Are." "He has hair sort of like yours."

He had to agree.

The crowds here were thicker than at the Sainte-Chapelle and that made it difficult to grasp the sacredness of the interior. It was only when I looked up that I could ignore the din and the camera flashes, and see the sharp verticals of the windows overpowering the horizontal lines of the – I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to summon the words from my textbook - pier arches, triforium and clerestory, urging my gaze ever upward.

But the best part was to come. We walked out and rounded the corner of the cathedral's north tower to find a dark, narrow stairway blocked by a red rope. A sign reading "Fermé" dangled from it, and the wooden booth for a ticket seller was empty. Edward paused there a moment, then unhooked the rope so we could step in, and reattached it. He stopped me when the stairs turned us out of sight of the street.

"Hop on," he said. Despite the unwieldy bag in his hand and me on his back, he sped us up the hundreds of terrifyingly warped steps with ease. He pushed at a door and let me slide down as we walked outside onto a sort of gargoyle-laden terrace above the facade through which we'd entered the cathedral. It was blessedly free of other people.

"Is it okay for us to be here?" I asked, ever the rule-follower.

"We're not causing any damage," he said evasively, then added as he saw my pointed look, "The ticket seller decided to close early today and have a cigarette. She's nearby, though, and will probably chase us out as soon as she sees us, so take advantage. Besides, this is much more … legitimate than the usual way my family gets up here."

I pondered for a second. "You climb?"

He nodded. "Up the sides or the apse. For many decades the sculptures on the main facade were too fragile even for us."

"And you never get caught?"

"Of course not," he said with his usual dismissiveness at the idea, "but I thought the more conventional way up would be more comfortable for you. Look, there's a fine view here."

I stepped between a horned monster of some kind and a bird of prey and did as he suggested as he stood a little behind me, watching my face, I knew. The south bank of the Seine and an untidy jumble of five- and six-story apartment buildings were spread out to my left below, then a network of straight-lined boulevards, then skyscrapers in the hazy distance. I could see the roof of the Sainte-Chapelle, spires of churches I didn't know, the Eiffel Tower. Edward identified for me the gold dome of Invalides, the arms of the Louvre and the stretch of green that was the Tuileries Gardens.

"It's so beautiful," I said, "but sort of monotonous, as if everything's been the same for centuries."

"And I see all the changes over the years. The old central market is gone, and so is the vélodrome by the Eiffel Tower, and Pompidou built an expressway along the Seine –" he pointed toward a road to our right, on the river's north bank "— he even wanted to cover the water to make the expressway wider …. The differences are even more dramatic for Carlisle, of course. You should have him describe Paris before Haussmann cleared so much of it in the 1860s, before the Tuileries Palace burned and before the Château de Saint-Cloud was destroyed." He paused. "The world has improved in many ways since I was born, but some changes make you a grumpy old man."

"One day, that big earthquake will hit Seattle and the Space Needle will collapse," I pointed out. "Then I'll be grumpy too."

He stepped closer so my back was against his chest. "You'll be my grumpy old woman," he said in my hair.

I sighed in agreement and contentment at leaning against him. There might be better views of Paris, but probably not more peaceful ones.

At least temporarily. "Prepare yourself," Edward murmured, and a minute later there was a screech. "M'sieurdame! C'est fermé, fermé!" a woman cried out, then apparently thinking we were too stupid to be French, she added, "It is closed!"

We turned to see a woman in a black uniform skirt and shirt under a maroon winter jacket. She was middle-aged, and wheezing slightly as she glared at us.

"I'm sorry, madame," Edward said. "I didn't see a sign."

He said it so persuasively and apologetically that I could see her searching her memory. Maybe she had somehow failed to attach the rope when she had gone upstairs before to chase everyone out. "Go now," she said finally, pointing us to the staircase we'd mounted. "Don't let anyone ascend."

"Of course not, madame," Edward said soothingly.

After we'd arrived back on the sidewalk, he asked, "Can you abide another church? I think you'll find it has a certain interest."

We crossed the bridge back to the Right Bank, skirted the grandiose City Hall, and found ourselves at a much quieter plaza. The church before us had a Baroque facade, but was Flamboyant Gothic and empty inside. Edward led me to the choir stalls.

"Look at the misereres," he said. "The carvings under the seats," he said in answer to my blank stare. "The choristers would rest on them when they had to stand a long time."

I moved closer to study the undersides of the seats, which mostly represented people at work: there was a medieval cobbler cutting a piece of leather, a baker putting loaves in an oven, two chefs at a spit ... a woman sitting in a big wooden bathtub, a naked man caressing her chin as he stepped in - "Some say he's her client at the bathhouse," Edward said - then finally, the one he was waiting for me to see, a man in a cassock slamming a stake into a befanged figure.

"I'll agree with you on that one," I said quietly so my voice wouldn't echo in the empty church. "I guess that monk was pretty bad at his job."

"I would imagine that he never saw a vampire in his life."

"How do you know about this?"

"Medieval churches are filled with little scenes like these. The fears and myths of the people became stone in obscure corners, and were forgotten. Visitors today are too busy looking at what is beautiful – the rose window, the light from the clerestory, the Madonna in her blue robe. They don't notice the snake under her feet. That helps keep us hidden. But the darkness is still here."

* * *

The early morning light was gray coming in through the French windows of our bedroom. The curtains were open and I could see the geraniums tumbling from the pots on the balcony. I could also feel something hard pressing into me from behind.

I turned and my lips met Edward's. "Give me a moment," I mumbled, trying not to send too much of my breath his way. I probably still smelled of dinner last night – we'd gone to a gorgeous old brasserie near the Sorbonne, where, Edward told me with a laugh after listening to the diners around us, the best thing on the menu was …French fries. Really, really, amazingly good French fries, with a steak on the side and un_ quart de rouge_ that made my eyes droop so much that Edward gritted his teeth and got a taxi to take us home.

I grabbed my robe from a chair and made my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth and such, then hurried back to our electrically warm cave of a bed, newly made squeakless thanks to a screwdriver borrowed from Mme Douzy. Edward smiled at me, his head propped up by his right arm, as I slid back under the covers and curled up facing him.

"Teach me some French so that I can buy my breakfast today," I said.

"Certainly," he answered. "Perhaps we can start with the names of body parts?"

"I'm not sure how that's going to get me a baguette, but okay."

"Oh, it'll help you get a baguette sure enough," he purred.

I stared at him a moment. "Is that like a bilingual double entendre?" I snorted. "You are so cheesy!"

"At least I didn't say baguette magique," he said, smirking. "Magic wand."

French men seemed rather full of themselves, I thought, as Edward started on my lesson.

"Let's begin here," he murmured, kissing my right shoulder. "L'épaule." He moved down to kiss under my arm, making me giggle as he inhaled. My awkwardness over his awareness of my scent had largely, if not completely, dispelled; his intense pleasure in it was a reminder of the predatory part of him, a part that was so arousing. "L'aisselle."

"Le coude," his lips moved to the inside of my elbow, "le poignet," my wrist, "la main et les doigts," kissing each finger. "La paume." He regarded my palm carefully before swirling his tongue there and making me jump. "Got that?"

"Absolutely," I said weakly. "Keep going."

He smirked at my transparent lie, then pulled the covers partway off so he had access to my leg.

"Les orteils," he said, starting at the bottom and giving my toes the same treatment as my fingers. "Le pied," kissing my instep, "le mollet," massaging my calf. His fingers felt so good after all the walking the day before.

"Le genou," underside of my knee, "et la cuisse," trailing kisses up my right thigh. He paused to breathe in at the crease of my leg, but avoided venturing into more volatile territory for the moment. "La hanche," he muttered into my hipbone, once again regarding my skin thoroughly_. Yes,_ I thought, as he started sucking at my hip, and I moaned. After a few moments, he lifted his mouth and looked down at the result.

"La mienne," he said to my hip, his voice so embued with possessiveness that he didn't need to translate that. "Now where was I?" he added, as if he could have possibly forgotten. "Ah, les fesses," stroking my backside and cupping a cheek with his hand. "Le nombril," a kiss to my belly button, "les côtes," pushing the tip of his nose between my ribs and making me giggle again. "La gorge," his lips pressed into the base of my throat, then trailed up my neck, "Le cou." He kissed the spot where yesterday's hickey was, and murmured, "Un petit bouton." He pulled back to gaze at it a moment, too.

"Hey, you skipped a part," I reminded him.

"You have a real thirst for … knowledge," he murmured into my neck. "We'll get to everything, I promise. My French lessons are very thorough."

My right ear was next. "L'oreille," he murmured, sending his cool breath over my ear and carefully mouthing my earlobe for several moments. He suddenly paused. "Is this cheesy, too?" he asked, surprising me with his uncertainty.

"Not when you do it," I said. The moisture between my thighs was proof of that. "I feel like Jamie Lee Curtis in that movie when she turns into goo when the guy talks to her in Russian."

"Good. I can give you an anatomy lesson in Russian sometime," he said. "Now... la joue, le nez, le menton," punctuating his words with a kiss on my cheek, my nose and my chin. "Les lèvres," a soft kiss, and then, so briefly that I felt only a quick spark, his tongue touched my top lip, the one I didn't worry with my teeth. "La langue."

He moved down again, pulling the blanket up over us both. My guess was that he was going to cover the vocabulary he'd missed before, and I was proved right.

"Le sein," he kissed the top of my left breast, then moved his lips to the side and the bottom. "La poitrine, le nichon." Hmm, the French also had multiple names for tits. " Le téton," he said as he arrived at my nipple, and my body arched in response.

"I think you might need more reinforcement on those terms," he said with mock severity, repeating the process on my right breast.

He slid farther down my body, until his face was level with my sex. "La chatte," he said huskily. He kissed my clit, then replaced his lips with his fingers. I gasped and bucked underneath him as he stroked me. He laid his head on my thigh and watched his fingers move on me. I knew he was breathing in my scent. I also knew I was going to come hard, and I did, moaning his name.

"Tu viens de prendre ton pied," he murmured after kissing his way up my body again. "C'est la petite mort."

He moved over me, rubbing his tip though my wetness. I grasped his hips in a signal to wait before he could push in, though it nearly killed me to stop him.

"What's this?" I asked, reaching down to run a finger along his length. "It seems like a pretty important part of the anatomy?"

"La bitte," he grunted, and gently pulled away my hand. The words for waiting and patience were not part of this lesson.

We groaned together as he entered me, and I had just enough presence of mind to ask, "And what are we doing now?"

"Nous nous envoyons en l'air," he growled. "Which just means that I'm going to fuck you thoroughly."

After that what we said was neither French nor English.

* * *

_A/N: Ah, Paris, city of lights and P.D.A. I warned you._

_All the mistakes in French are mine, not Edward's, of course. Let me know what they are. __"Tu viens de prendre ton pied" = You just came. __"La petite mort" = orgasm. (Thanks to Shalow for some fixes!)_

_Thanks to solareclipses for her rec. She, by the way, has a wonderfully written, almost completed "New Moon" AU, "Lovers in Disguise" that is a pleasure to read. You can find it on my favorites list._

_Someone asked why Alice doesn't see Bella's tremors. My theory is that Alice can't, because they don't involve a decision._

_Links on my profile page to the salacious miserere and moob demon._


	12. Chapter 12: FDR

_Disclaimer: I own neither "Twilight" nor Pushkin. _

* * *

Chapter 12: FDR

Edward did, in fact, manage to teach me enough so I could buy a baguette, but I got flustered when the woman at the boulangerie told me how many euros I owed her, since I was shaky on numbers. As I ate breakfast at the table in the salon, we talked about the day ahead - we had lunch reservations near the Musée Jacquemart-André, and the family was getting together in the evening, but we didn't have plans for the rest of the morning - and Edward invented obscene mnemonic devices for numbers.

"Un, deux, trois, quatre/ Bella is a sexy cat," he chanted. "Cinq, six, sept, huit …"

"Edward has the perfect bitte," I suggested.

He laughed. "I see my lesson really sank in," he said.

"Yeah, sank in," I snorted. "I wondered – _for a very brief moment_ –" I emphasized, "why it's la bitte, since it's obviously not a female thing."

"Do you want the short answer or the long?"

"The _long_ one, definitely."

He ignored that. "Parce que c'est ta meilleure amie, ta copine en temps de solitude! " Edward said. "Because she's your best friend, your companion when you're all alone."

"That's a … very guy response. And the short answer?"

"As it happens," he started to say, but he was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Alice, waving a bottle of concealer at me.

"Bonjour à tous," she said cheerfully, but stopped abruptly. "Bella, I make it a policy not to comment on your meals, but I must say that what you're eating smells absolutely vile."

I considered the blue-veined cheese on my plate. "I think most humans would say that too," I agreed. "But it's delicious. Edward picked it out."

Alice looked at him in puzzlement, then shrugged. "Love apparently has no olfactory senses," she said.

"In my case, I completely disagree," Edward said.

"True, but enough of that. The truth is you do have plans this morning," Alice told me.

I knew Alice too well. Hell, no. I drew in a breath and let it out with a hiss. "I'm not spending my first trip to Paris shopping!"

"Yes, you are," she said. I continued to look mutinous, though I knew that I had become spoiled in Hanover - I never had to go shopping with Alice; clothes just suddenly turned up in my closet and my dresser, my sister-in-law's contribution to making my life in college easier.

"Okay," she sighed, as she did when she knew what the outcome was but the person involved refused to believe her. "Bella, of course, you're not going to spend all your time here shopping. I would never suggest it. We're going to just one store, a place that doesn't exist in such a perfect form anywhere else. And it has something you desperately need."

"An A in Expository Writing?"

Alice looked at me as if I was particularly dimwitted even for a human. "Lingerie."

"Alice, I've gotten enough lingerie in the last few months to be a Trumpet and Pink franchisee."

"Strumpet," she said.

"That's your opinion," I muttered.

"How much of it is left?" Alice demanded.

I blushed, of course. Edward laughed, completely unabashed that Alice was calling him a panty-ripper. But she was right. My underwear did have a short lifespan around him. I got up in a huff to put away the cheese and butter from my breakfast in a little compartment in the wall under the kitchen window that Edward had told me was a sort of 19th-century refrigerator. When I returned to the salon, my husband and my sister were having one of their irritating silent exchanges. With Edward's slack-jawed expression, I could easily guess what it was.

_I will not allow Alice in the dressing room with me, I will not allow Alice in the dressing room with me,_ I thought.

Alice and Edward's heads whipped around to me as Alice's vision of me in some scanty ensemble abruptly disappeared. "You're not allowed in the dressing room," I said in triumph. "You know, that's just creepy."

Alice eyed me. "Perhaps, but I noticed that you've just agreed to go."

"Drat," I grumbled in defeat. I looked at Edward. "What are you going to do?"

"Our husbands are going to their favorite bookstore here," Alice answered for him.

"You suck," I told her. Why couldn't I go to a bookstore?

"Indeed," she said placidly.

"It's not fair," I said, glaring now at Edward.

"You are welcome to join us," he said, shooting a quelling look at Alice. "But …"

"But what?"

"But I'll definitely like what you're going to get," he promised.

The other Cullen women and I took the bus to the Rue des Saints-Pères, on the other side of the Seine. I continued to be surprised and charmed by their preference for public transport. Alice, Esme and Rosalie looked both perfectly Parisian and yet alien as they stepped off the wet sidewalk and onto the turquoise and white city bus with me.

On my own, I would never have noticed the boutique, with its discreet sign and lack of window displays. We were greeted at the door, and Alice delivered me immediately into the care of an older Frenchwoman with an admirably supported bosom and a pin cushion on her wrist who began meticulously taking my measurements in a back room. There was no conversation, since Mme Coigny gave no indication that she spoke English, and my mnemonic device seemed an inappropriate topic. I stared at red velvet wall hangings and thought about non-arousing topics like smelly cheese, and Dutch paintings, and the Mariners as she ran a measuring tape across my back and around my torso repeatedly. As the process stretched on, I got a little worried.

"Alice?" I murmured, knowing she could hear me.

A moment later, she was there.

"You're just about done, Bella," she said reassuringly. "It's almost been an hour. And you'll end up with the most fabulous bras, I promise you."

"Well, that's nice, but isn't it kind of a wasted effort?" I asked.

"Wasted?"

"Won't my, uh, measurements be different … after?" I waved my hand vaguely in front of my chest.

She laughed. "I assure you, you won't look like Mamie Van Doren." I looked at her in bafflement. "Okay, a little old for you. Um, you won't look like Pamela Anderson. I mean, look at me," she said, gesturing toward what I knew was her own modest, if beautiful cleavage. "Unless I started out with a concave chest, not much happened here."

Alice looked a little wistful. I guessed it was because she simply had no memory of what she was like before her change, not dissatisfaction with her décolletage. "If it somehow turns out there's much difference, Mme Coigny will adjust your numbers. But it's certainly better to do it now" – while your skin is a normal temperature, I understood - "because you'll become addicted to the selection here."

I wondered what the fitters had thought when they'd measured the Cullens in previous years. Based on Mme Coigny, who did not appear to have paid the slightest attention to our conversation, they'd pretended that nothing was out of the ordinary, and chalked up all their peculiarities to some rich people beauty treatment. Plastic surgery. Sheep placenta. Semen moisturizer. Bathing in the blood of virgins. Well, I didn't have to worry about that one now.

After trying on some sample bras and looking at sketches, I was finally released from the measurement room and given the unpleasant news that I'd have to come back for additional fittings for basted pieces. Alice went off with Madame to talk more about fabrics and styles, but not before directing me to a dressing room that she'd filled with suggestions.

"But I won't go into your fitting room," she said impishly. I rolled my eyes at her.

Though Alice stayed away, I wasn't alone for long. Rosalie knocked at the door, and walked in without waiting for my response. She smirked at me. "Nice hip hickey," she said. Edward's mark was just beginning to bloom on my skin.

"You're just jealous," I snarked back.

"Envious. I am," she said. "Come see what Esme is wearing. It's gorgeous."

I followed her, not sure I wanted to see my mother-in-law in a thong, even if she was the farthest thing from a typical mother-in-law one could imagine.

Thankfully, Esme was relatively well covered, in a white satin corset and a sort of attached petticoat that she must have ordered from Forks. She was so stunning that my mouth dropped. She was both voluptuous and slender, and it was all her, since no corset would be able to adjust a vampire's stone curves. After all, a bra for the Cullen women was an ornament, not a necessity.

"Esme, Carlisle is going to faint," Rosalie said. "Figuratively."

I sat down on the chaise in Esme's dressing room, sighing a bit. I hadn't realized how much my feet hurt.

"That is amazing on you," I told Esme. "Your waist is so tiny."

"Yes, I was a much better Edwardian than flapper."

"Um, are all the guys so … attuned to, um, underwear?" I flushed, realizing that I was essentially asking if my father-in-law had a corset fetish. Which would be surprising – if I'd had to pick anyone as a corset man, it would be Jasper, buffeted by everyone else's emotions, wanting some control in the bedroom … Ugh, my psychology class was messing up my brain.

Rosalie and Esme's eyes met in the mirror, and they both laughed. "I don't know about Edward's predilections," Rosalie started, winking at me and causing my blush to deepen. "Hmm, maybe now I do," she added wickedly. "But yes, Emmett finds my underthings very interesting. And ephemeral, hence our visit here."

"You have to understand that all of us, save Carlisle, came of age in eras when advertisements of undergarments were the closest most people ever got to seeing the opposite sex unclothed," Esme said. "They weren't even remotely titillating by today's standards, but still … they had their effect. Imagine, I had a bathing costume with stockings. Carlisle, though – well, some of the things he saw here in France under Napoleon even you would be shocked by, Bella."

"To be fair to the ladies of the Directoire, Bella's easily shocked," Rosalie broke in. Apparently she had had enough history. "The short answer to your questions is that we are responsible in significant measure for the Western world's consumption of oddly designed panties," she said. "You can bemoan it – or just enjoy it."

Back in my own dressing room I considered camisoles, underwear with various missing pieces, some more boy shorts. Edward seemed to really like those, and I wondered why. Did he have a thing for Ursula Andress and her bikini in "Dr. No"? I didn't recall the Cullens having any particular interest in Bond movies – after all, anything he could do, they could do with their eyes closed, without CGI. But surely in eight decades he had found someone – some actress, some singer – alluring?

I left the dressing room and found Esme and Rosalie sitting on a Louis Whatever settee in an alcove, pretending to be tired from trying on lingerie. As I sank down into the cushion between them, I could faintly hear Alice talking in rapid French to a saleswoman, probably arranging for delivery of our soon to be shredded underwear. The Cullens would need several planets to accommodate their lifestyle, I thought, if it weren't for their diet.

"Has Edward ever had a crush on someone?" I asked. "You know, like on Scarlett Johansson or something?"

"Ugh, she's so unnatural," Rosalie scoffed.

I gaped at her. "And venom is up there with henna and lemon juice as a natural product?"

"I am natural. In fact, I'm supernatural," she said, framing her face coquettishly with her hands. "Besides, you're one to be talking. You and Edward together - not natural."

Her words made my stomach jolt. Was that what was wrong with me? No, no, I reassured myself – Kate and Tanya's partners didn't fall apart … anymore.

I had come to realize that Rosalie didn't mean to hurt my feelings; she just didn't particularly care if she did. If I didn't let it bother me, she wouldn't be disappointed, because she didn't mean to be cruel – and she had no way of knowing that this was a worrisome subject for me.

Esme intervened when I didn't respond to Rosalie. "He admired Katharine Hepburn a great deal," she said. "I think she reminded him of his mother."

That made sense — a smart, independent brunette. Though I never thought of Hepburn as maternal. I wondered if that meant something.

"And he really 'admired' Debra Winger," Rosalie snorted. She looked at me appraisingly. "You might want to try a cowboy hat or a naval aviator's cap."

I blushed. That wasn't the motivation behind my question, but her comment did set my heartbeat racing.

"And don't forget Karen Allen!" Alice was suddenly next to us. "He loved 'Starman.' Which is oddly prescient, I guess."

"Why?" I asked. I'd never seen the movie, but maybe I should rent it sometime...

"Alien and human get together," she replied. "And there's a baby!"

Uh, maybe not.

"Alice," I moved on, my tone wheedling, "which of the things here did Edward like so much?"

Her eyes glinted maliciously. "I don't know," she said with a scowl. "You decided to kick me out of the room, don't you recall?"

"Oh, come on," I complained. "You remember what it was."

She considered me a second. "Yes, I do. And it was an item that I picked out for you."

"Which?"

"Not telling. You'll just have to try them all."

* * *

The men hadn't returned yet from their own excursion, and Alice came upstairs with me to show me what I should wear for lunch. Perhaps she was feeling mischievous after our trip to Ça Coûte Cher, because under my black and gold wrap dress, she decreed, I needed to wear a mesh bra and panties and black stockings held up by a garter belt.

"Alice," I moaned when she showed me her selections in the bedroom, "I'll feel like I'm in 'The Story of O.'"

"Ah, 'Histoire d'O,'" Alice sighed. "What a scandal that was in '54. 'Qu'il allait lui lier les mains dans le dos, par-dessus ses gants, lui défaire et lui rouler ses bas, lui enlever sa ceinture, son slip et son soutien-gorge, et lui bander les yeux. Qu'ensuite elle serait remise au château, où on l'instruirait à mesure de ce qu'elle aurait à faire -''' She stopped short and narrowed her eyes at me. "Wait, when would you have read that?''

"Uh, I didn't," I mumbled. She lifted an eyebrow. "I mean, I saw the beginning of a film version once in Phoenix, and the guy tells the heroine that she has to dress in clothes that open in the front. As if she's wearing an 'Always Open' sign. Then there were whips. I turned it off." It was the same movie that I remembered when Edward had mused about chains in New York. I obviously should have kept watching.

"You're not 'Always Open'?" Alice asked as she plugged in a curling iron. "You seemed to be this morning."

I threw one of the shoes she'd set out for me at her, knowing she'd barely notice it. "Alice!" I said.

She yelped when it struck her thigh. "That almost hurt," she said in astonishment.

"I'm sorry – it must have hit you at a bad angle?" I couldn't believe that she actually felt it.

"Don't worry. No damage done." She winked at me.

"Maybe it's what you get for trying to foist high heels on me."

"They are not high. And one day you'll wear stilettos without noticing."

"No. I plan to be an awesome, beautiful vampire in sneakers and flip-flops."

Alice shuddered theatrically. "No flip-flops. Ever," she said. "Sit. I'll arrange your hair."

She pulled the slipper chair in front of a standing mirror, and I plopped down for my coiffing session. "So that's who the chains are for," I murmured as she ran a brush through my hair. It felt incredible.

The brush went still. "What chains?" Alice asked. She looked genuinely puzzled.

"Oh, sorry," I said hastily. "It's something Edward said back in -"

"He didn't say it about me. 'The Story of O' is rather an unpleasant little book, by the way, in case you're considering reading it." She started brushing again, and I sagged in the chair. Edward brushed my hair sometimes when we were cocooned in the blankets, but my hair always ended up more tangled than when he started…

"Um, Alice?" I asked, straightening up abruptly.

"Yes?"

"You heard me this morning?" My voice sounded small.

She stopped again and stared at me in the mirror. "We all hear one another all the time, and we ignore it," she said, perfectly serious. "I admit that it's different with you and Edward – it's still new to us, and we're so happy for him, and for you, that we're thrilled to see you together, or hear you, and I know I get a little giddy, and we will tease – because what's the pleasure in life without teasing? - but it's all affectionate … Please don't be self-conscious. When you're ready to share a house with us, you won't need to worry."

My heart swelled at her words. "Thanks, Alice," I said. "I know you miss him."

"We miss you both, but we're willing to wait our turn."

Alice had touched up the concealer on my neck and was threatening me with a lipstick application when I heard Edward's voice from the salon.

"Alice, you better not be putting lipstick on my wife," he declared.

"You can't come in, and why not?" she said.

"I want to kiss her."

"It'll come off during lunch."

"I fully intend to kiss Bella much earlier than that."

"Hi, honey," I called out.

"Hello, darling," he answered, his tone now caressing, and Alice made a kissy face and rolled her eyes. "If you'd like me to rescue you from the clutches of my sister, just say the word."

Alice gave up, and I smiled at her. "It's okay," I reported. "She's putting the evil tube of lipstick away."

I lost the other skirmish, though. "I'm going to be a Pointer Sister in this bra," I complained, surveying myself in the long mirror after I'd put on the thin wrap dress.

"Oooh, a '70s reference!" Alice said in mock admiration.

"It's from Renee," I said, but Alice started singing, "She's so excited, and she just can't hide it," and I groaned. "C'mon," I whined, "you have all these arcane rules about mink coats, but it's perfectly fine for me to display my nipples in public?"

There was a "What?" from the salon.

"The print on the dress will hide them," Alice said breezily, "from everyone except Edward."

"That's all right, then," my traitor husband said, and this time I gave up.

After pronouncing me ready and accepting Edward's compliments, Alice skipped out, but not before giving her brother her deep sympathy for having to spend an afternoon in such close proximity to food. He shrugged and then sat back down on a striped armchair where he had been reading one of his new books. Or rather, a very old one.

"It's by Astolphe de Custine, a French traveler in Russia in 1839," he said, when I asked. "I'm giving it to Yefimov; he's been looking for it in the original, and I found an early edition. The Russians were so offended by Custine's commentary they banned the book, and then the Soviets after them." It occurred to me then that Edward had more in common with his 60-year-old professor than his ostensible peers. It made sense, but it was hard to reconcile with the teenager's face gazing at me.

I perched unsteadily on the narrow arm of his chair so I wouldn't get in the way of his book, but he immediately pulled me onto his lap. I oofed, and he frowned a moment. "I'm sorry. Can I kiss it better?"

"Absolutely."

"Mmm, much better without lipstick," he said afterward, and I shifted against his hard chest. I'd have to get up soon.

"Can you say something to me in Russian?" I asked.

"Of course." He drew in a breath and began:

_Ya vas lyubil: lyubov yeshto, byt mozhet,_

_V dushe mojej ugasla ne sovsem;_

_No pust' ona vas bol'she ne trevozhit:_

_Ya ne khochu pechalit' vas nichem._

_Ya vas lyubil bezmolvno, beznadezhno,_

_To robostyu, to revnostyu tomim:_

_Ya vas lyubil tak iskrenno, tak nezhno,_

_Kak dai vam Bog lyubimoi byt drugim._

It was nothing like the French lesson earlier. The words were melancholy, not seductive.

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"It's a Pushkin poem, his most famous:

_"I Ioved you, and perhaps this love_

_in my soul has not yet died out;_

_But let it not dismay you any longer:_

_I do not want to grieve you with anything._

_"I loved you silently, hopelessly,_

_now timid, now jealous;_

_May God grant that another someday will love you_

_as sincerely, as tenderly as I did."_

"Is that how you felt?" I didn't need to specify _when._

"Yes, though I didn't really want another to love you as I did. But I told myself I did. I was such a fool."

"You were," I agreed, and he looked surprised. "What, I'm not allowed to call you a fool?"

He shook his head. "No, of course not. You just never have, even though you were the person most entitled to do so – more so than Emmett and Alice and Jasper, and they called me a fool and worse, many times, in their heads. They couldn't help it."

"Did Esme and Carlisle?" I didn't bother asking about Rosalie, because I was pretty sure she'd started calling both of us idiots when I'd shown up in Forks.

"They're parents. They exuded silent distress, which was probably worse." He paused. "I know you've forgiven me, more easily than I deserve. But is that enough?" He gingerly placed the flat of his hand on my heart, below the vee of my dress, his fingers still cold through the fabric.

I put my hand on his. "When we make decisions together, when I feel that I have a chance to be your partner, your equal … well, as much as I can be in my current state… that makes me so happy," I said softly. "You were a fool for deciding what was best for me without me, but I've been pretty foolish sometimes too. We're perfect for each other." I shifted in his lap again. Extended relationship-discussion time would have to wait until I was on a softer, warmer surface. "Except temperature wise. Let me up."

"Give me three seconds, and I'll dress," he said after he'd put me on my feet. True to his word, he was back in a flash, clad in a charcoal suit, a tie hanging unknotted from the collar of his blue shirt. He stood in front of the mantel mirror, and began his tying ritual, at a human speed. Ah, he was teasing me.

"Yes?" he asked as I ogled him. Maybe I was developing a tie fetish. Maybe I should just drop psych class.

"It's just that you're so gorgeous doing that," I confessed. He smirked, and I added, "Is it a total cliché from the '50s, imagining taking your tie off?"

He had probably seen thousands of women picture sliding his tie from his collar, unbuttoning his shirt...

"Indeed. No one's thought that since ... ummm... the last time I wore a tie."

Conceited tease.

"I particularly remember that last time a beautiful brunette, with big brown eyes," he went on, turning away from the mirror and stepping in front of me, his hands still working, "with the most delicious blush, and the softest lips…."

He leaned down to me, and we were mostly silent for a few minutes.

"Did you wear a hat in the '50s, too?" I asked when we had broken off and I had caught my breath.

"When I was an adult, but it was hard with my hair. I was so relieved when Kennedy was sworn in without his hat. Fedoras suited Carlisle particularly well. But Em, well..."

I giggled. "I cannot picture Em in a suit and hat."

"He did look a bit like the muscle in a gangster movie when he wore a double-breasted suit. Alice put an end to that."

"I bet she did."

I sidled away so I could survey him. "Is that a new suit?" I asked. "I haven't seen it before." The drape of the wool was remarkably elegant, and the suit fitted Edward perfectly, almost as if he had had to once spend a morning or two standing on a box, as I had, being measured repeatedly.

"No, it's very old. I got it after the second war, in London, but Alice has allowed me to keep it."

"She's right. You look amazing in it." He did, and the suit helped him do a particularly effective version of his "today I'm 27" trick. "Am I your wife or the hedge-fund mogul's mistress for this lunch?" I asked, smiling.

But he looked at me gravely. "I waited too long - I'm not ready to pretend you're not my wife," he said. "I don't know how I'm going to manage it when we'll have to be foster-siblings one day."

"Must we?" The idea saddened me too.

"We don't have to do anything, but it's a story that's worked for us so far. Though perhaps what worked for five eerily pale foster children won't work for six. We have a few years before we have to worry about it." He sighed. "Come back here?" he asked.

I stepped closer and stood in front of him uncertainly. "Here's the part where you straighten my tie and give me a kiss," he told me.

"Oh. I can do that," I said. I pretended to adjust his perfect knot, and rose on my tiptoes to give him a peck.

"No, more of a kiss than that," he said, wrapping his arms around my waist and lifting me up to his face. This kiss was long and needy, and he groaned as he pulled back, "Damn, we have to get to lunch." I nodded. We may have had all the time in the world, but it never seemed like enough.

* * *

The restaurant was far enough away that my shoes had started to hurt just a bit by the time we arrived, despite their chunky heels. Only a small brass plaque on a townhouse told diners they had come to the right address. We entered a softly lighted foyer and relinquished our coats to a gray-haired woman, then a bald man came to lead us to our table.

It was a tribute to the chef that just a few people looked up from their meals as Edward stepped into the paneled dining room. We were seated at a table for two situated between a group of Japanese businessmen drinking brandy and their apprehensive-looking female colleague, and a blond woman in her early 20s and her much older lunch companion - her father, I guessed.

My upholstered chair should have been comfortable, but I had to shift around on it to get everything untwisted and settled. I wondered again why Alice felt this getup was practical.

"What's wrong?" Edward asked.

"Alice put me in something I'm not used to, so I'm having to adjust a bit."

"May I ask exactly what? Alice's thoughts on the subject were not as precise as I might wish," he said. The combination of his formal tone and his salacious intent sent a flush of heat under my dress. Well, then…

I leaned forward to whisper. "Garter belt. Thigh-highs. Transparent -." Our menus arrived, cutting me off, and Edward exhaled abruptly. "Ah, you get the idea," I concluded as he shifted on his own seat.

As I looked over the menu, I could see dishes Edward would want me to order — something with caviar, something with foie gras, something with pheasant and foie gras. But, there, under the first courses, was something too fitting to resist.

"I want to try ordering myself," I announced. "You have to help me with pronunciation, though."

We negotiated over what I would eat, and then the waiter approached. "Je voudrais les raviolis aux champignons," I said in my bad French. "Et ensuite le faisan, s'il vous plaît."

I smirked as Edward rolled his eyes and then placed his half of the order. When the waiter left, he pouted. "I'm fairly certain you've had that before," he said.

"Will it be remotely the same?"

"Probably not," he conceded.

It wasn't. The mushroom ravioli floated in a veal broth and came after an amuse-bouche involving celeriac and lots of butter – "It's a root vegetable, " Edward said, trying to be helpful when I asked him what it was exactly.

"Bella Italia doesn't have anything on this place," I confirmed.

I could have eaten all the ravioli, but I knew I had to pace myself. "Okay, switch," I said, and a bowl of watercress soup with caviar resting on a pillow of crème fraîche appeared before me.

I looked up from the soup to see that Edward was actually eating the ravioli. "The waiters here are too attentive," he answered in a barely audible whisper when I asked why. "They've noticed I'm not eating, and I can't hide the food in my napkin either. The chef will come out."

"I'm so sorry." I wondered if the richness of the dishes made it harder for him. "Do you not like butter?"

"Apparently not," he answered. He almost looked nauseated. Alice's expression of sympathy took on a different meaning now.

To give him an excuse not to eat, I asked, "How often have you been here?'

"To Taillevent?" he asked, putting his fork down with visible gratitude. The eating thing was really throwing him off his game.

"No, no, Paris."

"Um, many times," he said vaguely. He didn't feel comfortable being specific - perhaps one of our neighbors was thinking about trying to eavesdrop. "My, uh, grandfather came here in 1944 and had an astonishing experience."

I was startled. Edward was here during World War II?

"Was he by himself?" I asked.

"No, with his parents, and Great-Uncle Emmett and Great-Aunt Rosalie." I smiled at the idea of Emmett being a great-uncle. "It was the end of August. The Germans had just retreated, and the Free French troops were moving into the city. General de Gaulle planned to make a triumphal entry into Notre-Dame for a Te Deum and they inveigled their way in to watch.

"The emotion was overwhelming. The Parisians were ecstatic that the Nazis were leaving, but there were fears that the Germans were going to make some destructive parting gestures – which they were; they had elaborate plans to blow up all the monuments. In addition, nobody knew who was going to be in charge. The Communists were plotting, and so was de Gaulle. He marched into Notre Dame, down the center aisle of the nave, and snipers' bullets started flying, both inside the church and from the tower we were in yesterday."

My breath caught, as irrational as it was. "Most everyone ducked, except de Gaulle." And the Cullens. "None of the bullets hit him. For a long time after that Uncle Emmett claimed that he had blocked a few of them and kept France from going Communist." Edward shrugged. "Uncle Emmett was always a big talker, but he liked to show off the shirt he wore that day. It had a couple of holes."

Jeez. I'd have to ask Emmett about it; he'd love that. I looked down at the table and realized that our waiter had cleared away my plate without my noticing, a reminder that I needed to be more careful about my conversation. "That was your … grandfather's first trip to Paris? Not earlier?"

"He and the rest of the family didn't find the idea of spending a week on a boat crossing the Atlantic very practical. And Aunt Rosalie didn't like the idea of …getting her hair wet."

I took a moment to process that. "Swimming?" I mouthed. He nodded. Of course they'd be able to swim endlessly, but I still found it hard to believe they could cross the ocean. And the logistics would be daunting. Where would their clothes be?

"But with the start of commercial trans-Atlantic flights in 1939," Edward went on, "then they could come to Europe."

When our main courses arrived, they were already divided up, two plates for each of us. The waiters had been watching. Edward couldn't suppress a faint groan, but resolutely picked up his fork again. The businessmen to my left had disappeared, but I stole a glance at the woman and her father to my right. Their fingers were entwined and resting on the tablecloth, forcing me to reassess their relationship. May-December. Mistress-keeper. I reminded myself that I had little room to be judgmental. Maybe it was just love.

Meanwhile, I was getting steadily more tipsy. My glass always seemed to be full, though I never saw it being refilled. And the wine was awfully good, a St-Estèphe that Edward had picked out of the sommelier's head.

"I have to stop drinking," I groaned in turn. I saw our waiter at the little table where our bottle rested in a cradle; he was getting ready to pour.

"Tap the rim of your glass with your finger, and he'll stop refilling it," Edward said. I did, and the motion stopped the waiter, bottle in hand, in his tracks.

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"Emily Post. I've had to occasionally pretend to be a well-brought-up young man, instead of the lecherous centenarian that you've uncovered," he said, his mouth curling in that extraordinarily sexy way he had only for me. "Good manners hide a lot of depravity." Well, fuck me, I thought uncontrollably.

Our neighbors got up from their table shortly before we did. As we stepped into the foyer on our way out, I could see December helping May with her coat. It was a mink.

* * *

We left the restaurant and turned right, heading toward the Boulevard Haussmann. Despite the tea I'd ordered in hopes of clearing my head, I felt full and hazy and, most of all, scandalously if legally inebriated for daylight. I looked up at Edward, who seemed to have recovered from his culinary trauma. His arm was around me as we walked along the narrow, empty street lined with apartment buildings much like the one we were staying in, and I rested my head on my shoulder and breathed in his scent. Mmmm, more delicious than anything I'd just eaten. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to drown in his kiss, nothing more than for him to touch me.

He let me pull him into the recessed doorway of an apartment building, and to press him into the stone jamb. At that moment, I couldn't care who saw us, and the impropriety of our behavior fueled my urgency. I felt him hard against me as we kissed, and I was vaguely aware that his fingers were flying on the keypad of the digicode. There was a faint click as the massive wooden door unlocked, and Edward pushed it open, leading me into a covered passageway. The entrance to the building was to our right; a stone courtyard with an old horse trough filled with pots of that ubiquitous geranium was in front of us. He guided me close to the wall, and breathed into my ear, "The concierge is asleep, and the rest of the building is empty. You needn't think about anything but what my hands are doing to you."

He unbuttoned my coat in a second, and I pulled open the collar and arched my neck to him so he could bury his face in the curve of my shoulder. He groaned as I tangled my fingers in his hair. He ran his hands under my coat to stroke my back, my breasts, his cold fingers raising my nipples beneath my dress, my Pointer Sister fears being realized in a wonderful way.

"I need to touch you, Bella," he mumbled. "May I?"

"Please," I whispered back, my body quivering. "Give me your hand." I took his fingers into my mouth to warm them up. As I sucked them, he groaned again, then he pulled his hand away and shoved it into the opening of my dress, spinning me around in the process so my back was against his chest. My underwear became a collateral victim, and a small part of my mind pictured Alice cackling in vindication. I gasped as his wet but not icy fingers found my clit, and I pressed one hand to the wall and used the other to clutch his thigh and help keep myself upright. His lips pulled gently at my neck as his fingers worked, and the combination was so good, the sensation so sharp, that my body soon jolted hard in release. Edward's free hand moved from my hair to keep my cry in my mouth.

After a moment, I turned around and, slid my hand down his torso till it found the bulge in his pants. "Oh, yes," he hissed as I gripped him through the fabric. He helped me out by unbuckling his belt and lowering his zipper so I could slip my hand in. He was cold and hard and ready, and this time I put my own fingers into my mouth to warm them; the wetness on my hand mixed with his own when I stroked him. He put his hand on mine to guide me along his length, over the soft skin of his tip. It was my turn this time to stifle his cry. He shuddered as my hand pressed against his lips, then he caught his release in his hand. We leaned against each other to catch our breaths, to let my heartbeat slow and my legs regain their strength.

He pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, and I bent down to gather the filmy, unwearable shreds of my underwear at my feet. By the time I returned to vertical, he was almost presentable again, and he wrapped his arms around me. I looked up at him. This time his tie really did need adjustment, so I straightened the knot, and he smiled softly.

"I'm going to miss being able to get you drunk," he said, pensive, running a fingertip across the hectic red of my cheek, and I snorted.

"Since you seem able to get me to misbehave with you in inappropriate places even without alcohol, I think you won't miss it at all," I observed, recalling the terrace, the lake, the classroom …. "By the way, did Alice stash any useful lingerie in your coat pockets?" I'd already checked mine, in vain, when I'd shoved in the scraps of my underwear.

He shook his head. "No. Your … situation should make our next stop interesting." He ran assessing fingers over the unprotected curve of my hip, then stilled and pulled his hand away. "I should rinse off," he said, nodding to the spigot at the horse trough, "and we should go. The concierge is waking up from her sieste."

"Okay, but I'm smashed, I'm in a wrap dress, and I don't have underwear. If you let me trip and fall… ." I let my threat trail off, having nothing to back it up with. I'll deprive you of sex? Hah.

"Believe me," Edward murmured, "the prospect will make me keep my hands on you the entire time."

* * *

The Jacquemart-André reminded me of the Frick Museum in New York: it was the obscenely large house of an obscenely rich person with a taste for art opened to the plebes - come to think of it, the Louvre was too, just on a much larger scale. I walked there carefully, fearful of banana peels or dog poop or an errant gust that would expose me, and making sure Edward was close enough to catch me without exposing himself.

It was late enough that the museum cafe next to the entrance was more crowded than the museum itself. In the first room we visited, I was immediately drawn to a Nattier portrait from 1738, of a girl tightly corseted in a white satin dress garlanded with flowers, a bird perched on her finger and her hair powdered. As I gazed at it, I wasn't sure whether to be disarmed or depressed, because the subject was heartbreakingly young – and already married, based on her name. A child bride with a cupid's-bow mouth and sad eyes.

"Do you know anything about her?" I asked Edward. The card on the cherry-papered wall describing the painting said little beyond the title, "Portrait de Mathilde de Canisy, Marquise d'Antin," and the artist's name.

"She was 12, and her husband was 28," he answered, seeming to know the information I most wanted.

"He must have seemed so old to her," I murmured. Twenty-eight seemed old even to me.

But Edward was chuckling next to me. "You're one to be talking."

"There is a big difference between 12 and 18."

"Is there now?"

"So subtle. I'll also note that there's a big difference between 28 and 108," I said tartly. "Does this painting annoy you?"

He hesitated a moment. "No - she's rather generic, don't you think? Except for those grave eyes..."

"I wonder if she was ever happy," I said quietly.

"I don't know if history can tell us that. She was a widow for most of her life, she had no children, but she was friends with talented people….We should ask Carlisle," he said, his voice much lower now, his breath brushing my ear as he whispered, his hands back on my hips. "Perhaps he met her."

There were many, many more portraits of pretty aristocrats on the ground floor, and lots and lots of gold moldings and marble. It was almost oppressive and I felt on edge, but I wasn't sure if that was due to the decor or my lack of underwear. I was, however, sure it was the latter that made me hyperaware of Edward's hands on my arm or the small of my back or the nape of my neck. I was also sure it was the latter that made his fingers brush occasionally across my bottom, too quickly for human eyes to see but not for my body to react to.

If the ground floor was uncrowded, the upper floor of the museum was positively deserted. Edward led me into a dim room that was a startling contrast to the gilt of the story below. The Italian Renaissance paintings, all religious, glowed under spotlights, and he stopped in front of a Madonna and Child.

I looked at the card, and then at Edward curiously. "It's a Mantegna," I said, nothing out of the ordinary for an Italian Renaissance exhibition.

"That's what art historians believe."

Oh. "It's Ricciardo?"

"Same period, same patron ... and it's a parody, a very subtle one," he said, pointing out how the painting had the odd perspectives and cupids and swags that Mantegna was so fond of. "It's not surprising that everyone thinks it's Mantegna, but it was Ricciardo's joke, and a clever one. He probably sold it to Nélie Jacquemart himself. What do you think?"

By this point, I was worked up enough to be almost irritated that my tease of husband was giving me the art inquisition once more, but I considered the Madonna again. "He continues to leave me cold, even when he's imitating a human," I said dismissively, if honestly. Edward shook his head in disbelief. "So ... any other vampires in here?"

"There is, in fact," he said. He led me to the corner of the room farthest from the door, not far from a glass cabinet. "Stand right here," he said, cupping my ass with his hand and pressing his lips to mine. I gasped on his month, as his hand snaked into the opening of my dress. A cool finger ran over the stocking and then hooked over the silken top on my inside thigh without touching my skin.

"I am liking this dress more and more," he murmured as he pulled at the fabric, his hand so close to my bare sex that I could feel the chill there.

"Edward…." I whispered unsteadily, pushing on his chest. I wasn't sure that my initiation into museum sex should be next to a vitrine of priceless paintings. And there were practical considerations too, even ignoring our temperature contrast. Surely there was a camera in here, somewhere? "Maybe we should continue this at the apartment … under a blanket ... in the shower …"

I could feel him stop breathing under my hand. He gently released my stocking, and stepped back a few inches. "You're right," he said, apology in his voice. "I've been pawing at you all day, and I need to control myself so we can go home. You should probably nap."

"What? No."

"Oh, yes," he corrected me, his teeth now gleaming as he smiled. "You'll need to save your strength for tonight."

* * *

A/N:

_Thanks to solareclipses for reading this and shedding light on my obscurities. She recommends the "Starman" trailer on imdb for its epic '80s cheesiness. I recommend her new Twilight AU, "Sins of the Piano Man," which is on my favorites list._

_There are links to the painfully young marquise d'Antin and the attack on de Gaulle on my profile page._

_Your reviews are more encouraging to me than I can say._


	13. Chapter 13: ORY

_Disclaimer: $237 million and counting say "Twilight" and its characters belong to Stephenie Meyer, not me._

_So, um, this chapter? Not all that educational._

* * *

Chapter 13: ORY

The eight of us stopped next to a high stone wall on a narrow street in the Marais that looked as if it had been there for centuries, because it had. I had taken a nap at Edward's urging while he left to take care of unpleasant vampire business involving food from one of the world's best restaurants, and now it was dark. The streetlights glistened on the pavement - even when it hadn't rained since the night before, the streets of Paris seemed perpetually wet.

"Here we are," Emmett announced portentously. "The mikvah." Rosalie snorted next to him.

"Okay, I don't know what that is," I said. "You may enlighten me."

"The Jewish ritual bath," he explained, taking on a professorial air. Something about the feel of Edward's chest against my back made me sure that he was holding back a laugh. "Women would come here to immerse and cleanse themselves after childbirth, or their menses. If they were niddah, ritually impure, they had to keep themselves isolated until they could bathe. You might recall that in the Synoptic Gospels, a woman with an uncontrollable hemorrhage surreptitiously touches Jesus' cloak and is cured. First thing she would have done is go bathe."

I couldn't help but gape at him a bit. "Religious studies, McGill, 1975," he said, thumping his chest.

"You know, you're kinda cute when you get all scholarly," I told him.

"He is," Rosalie agreed quietly.

"Thanks. But I never figured out why they were so uptight about the blood," Emmett mused. "I mean, it's not as good as fresh, but still -"

"Emmett, stop!" a chorus of Cullens urged him. There was silence for a moment.

I finally broke it. "So ... why are we here?"

"Now anybody can come and use the baths," Carlisle said. "It's more like a spa now, and we're taking it over for the night. We also thought we'd take your suggestion, and send you and Edward in first."

I stared up at the wall. "Are we climbing?" I asked, thinking of their usual way of visiting Notre Dame. The only openings I could make out were two high windows covered in iron grilles.

"You are definitely not climbing," Edward assured me, ushering me down the sidewalk. I noticed a shuttered synagogue across the street, and a shop window displaying silver cups and a menorah, before we stopped in front of a pair of unmarked wooden doors. Edward opened one, and we stepped into a reception area with walls that mimicked the stone outside. Niches filled with candles lighted the room, and low tables and sofas in red and orange fabrics gave it a vaguely Moroccan air.

An extremely pretty young Frenchwoman met us. "Bonsoir, monsieur," she said, before vaguely adding "… et madame." She was wearing a narrow skirt that suited her wonderfully; she had the full, pouty lips so many Parisiennes had, and her hair was drawn back in the perfect chignon, smooth and silky and touchable. She had eyes only for my husband, and I saw the flaw with my suggestion – with just the two of us, she didn't have the beauty of the other Cullens to distract her from Edward's.

"Bonsoir, madame," Edward replied. "Nous sommes les Cullen. Les autres arrivent dans quelques minutes."*

"Bien sûr," she answered. "Tout est prêt comme vous avez demandé, mais est-ce que vous désirez des soins? Une séance de massothérapie pour vous, monsieur? Je suis -"

I didn't know what she was saying, but I didn't like it.

Edward apparently knew what she was thinking, and didn't like it either. He stared at her blankly. "So sorry," he said, adopting a variation of the English accent Carlisle used when he was with just his family. "I've used up all my French. My wife has an appointment for a massage, I know. Could you show us the way to our room?"

The woman flinched, then breathed in sharply, her inhalation punctuated by a little hiccup at the end, a nervous habit, I guessed. "Of course," she said, and led us down a stone-walled hallway interrupted periodically by doors. She stopped before one and pushed it open. "Here is your room, and Mayra, your massage therapist, will be with you shortly. The hammam area is at the end of this corridor." She stared at Edward again, and seemed to be searching for words.

"Ah, I hear the rest of my family arriving," Edward said. I heard nothing, but the woman dutifully excused herself and made her way back to the front to be dazzled by Carlisle.

As she disappeared down the hall, I whispered to Edward, "Why are you British?"

"The French despise British accents," he answered. He cocked his head toward our room. "Come, let's take a look."

I squeaked a little when I stepped into the room, because it was as if it was a made-to-order Bella-Edward playroom. A hot tub bubbled in the center, a rectangle of still water was beyond it, and a sauna, steam room and shower were lined up along one wall. More candles flickered in niches, their subdued light gilding Edward's face. There was a massage table just in front of us, and a divan on the far side of the pool. Perhaps there was an electric blanket somewhere too ...

A soft cough behind me interrupted my increasingly lubricious thoughts, and I turned around. "Bonsoir, m'sieurdame," a dark-skinned woman dressed in uniform white said in greeting.

"Mayra, n'est-ce pas?" Edward asked.

He looked at her for a moment, then launched into a stream of Portuguese that obviously delighted her. My husband, disarming Lusophone women around the globe. He and Mayra had an animated conversation for a few minutes, then she told me cheerfully, "je reviendrai," and left.

"She's from São Tome," Edward said. "A sweetheart. And she has no English. So - take a shower, dry off, and hop onto the massage table …." He patted the pale orange sheets covering the table, and groaned.

"What?"

"They're warm. And by this point I'm like Pavlov's dog when it comes to warm sheets." I made an appreciative noise as his erection nudged me. He sighed and continued. "I told her you were allergic to a perfume - which was necessary because she was going to cover you with patchouli or other equally horrible substances - and that your feet hurt."

They did, but I hadn't complained. "How did you know that?" I asked.

"Podiatry, Johns Hopkins, 1959."

"Really?" I didn't remember him living in Baltimore.

"No," he said, amused. "You couldn't really think that. I just need to compete with Emmett. But I can see that you're trying to keep weight off the balls of your feet."

Really, more than I deserve. "What are you going to be doing while Mayra rubs my instep?"

"Shvitz." He smiled at my expression. "Emmett studied Yiddish, too. Of course, since we can't sweat, it's the wrong word. I'll be in the big hammam with the rest of the family."

"Should I join you after -" I started to ask.

He shook his head. "You and your scent in a steam room with a half-dozen vampires probably isn't a good idea, and not because anyone would dream of attacking you. But it can get … uncomfortable, if one isn't as desensitized as I am."

I nodded, remembering how pained Alice looked when I hugged her after not having seen her for months.

"What about that problem in your pants?" I teased him. "Steam rooms are pretty warm, you know."

"Emmett feels that a crucial part of this experience is chasing all of us around with a big bunch of birch branches in the hot room, and that should take care of it."

"Birch branches?"

Edward shrugged. "Increases the circulation." I snickered at the idea, and he kissed my temple softly. "Shower, now. Say "arrêtez!" if she brings out the patchouli. And," he gave me an extravagant leer, "I'll come back to give you a hot stone massage." He left me laughing.

I didn't have much experience in this – story of my life — but Mayra's massage felt terrific, even if her small, warm hands were strange after the cold ones I was used to. Edward had been convincing and Mayra both worked my feet thoroughly and used unscented lotion. "Reposez-vous quelques minutes, madame," she said when she finished.

"Merci beaucoup," I mumbled. I didn't feel like moving a muscle. She quietly left the room.

I didn't hear Edward, but I knew he was there, the sensation of his presence speeding my pulse. So I jolted only a little when he murmured in my ear, "Hello, sweet girl, how was it?"

"Fantastic. No perfumes."

He mmmed against my skin of my shoulder. "_Most _people do follow my instructions."

"That must get boring," I said, pushing myself up so the sheet that the masseuse had draped over me slid off and swinging my legs over the side of the table so I could sit up and face him.

"I _never _get bored, Mrs. Cullen," he promised me, running warm fingertips along my bare arms.

His white terry robe tied at the waist, and I slipped my hands into it to touch his chest. He was shockingly, superbly, hot against my palms and I yanked down against the sash so it opened and I could press my torso against his. We both moaned, and he lifted my thighs to let my legs curl around his hips. There was both relief and agony in the contact.

"I think your circulation has increased," I murmured.

"Greatly," he agreed, pulling me in tighter. "Are you ready for a ride?"

"What kind of –-" I began to ask, but a second later I had my answer, for the table was now lodged in a corner of the room, and I was sitting on one end, the lower end. He had adjusted it. His hands floated me back down on the sheets, and his lips moved on the closed mouth that longed to be able to open to his, the cheek that reddened with blood under his touch, the neck that arched under his tongue. His tongue … um, where was I? his tongue wet on my collarbone, pointed on the pink of my breasts, flat on the nipples that sent a demand to my pelvis to rub along his length hard against me, to make his chest rumble with his growl.

I pulled impatiently on the robe that now blocked my hands, and he flung it away before sliding me to the edge of the table. The sound of wet flesh meeting wet flesh mixed with our moans, and his push in was smooth and sure. My answering groan reverberated in the room, surprisingly loud.

"Bella?" he asked, his body suddenly as still as one of the nearly perfect Greek statues he scorned. Once again, I had to marvel at his exquisite control, the control he so feared losing.

"S'okay," I mumbled, because I certainly wasn't in pain. But I wasn't really sure everything was okay when he resumed his movements. My body was writhing with abandon under his, and I felt on the verge of sobbing. "What are you doing to me?" I asked when it got to be too much, my voice cracking.

"Shhh, baby, it'll be all right," he soothed me, slowing his hips and rubbing his fingers against my scalp. "I'll take care of you; I'll always take care of you. Just relax." His tempo was now gentle and unhurried, and I juddered against him at each stroke, every one an experience in itself, shaking in a way completely unlike the tremors that worried me. But as with those tremors, I didn't understand - we had made love much more forcefully than this without my feeling as if I was about to disintegrate.

Still, Edward didn't seem worried – his face was glowing, his dark eyes intent on me, our slow pace making it unnecessary for me to guide his strength. I probably couldn't have anyway, since all I could do was whimper and flail. Edward shifted slightly so he could pin my arms between his elbows, and that was oddly calming.

"You're so beautiful, I've got you, I love you," he continued to croon even as he moved in me and on me thanks to the incline. "Relax, baby, I've got you, you're -"

"Ah!" I cried, disrupting his litany, arching as well as I could being caged in by his body.

"That's it, that's it, I'm …." he murmured in response. "Oh, _fuck_…" He bowed and stilled in turn before exhaling harshly and dropping his forehead into the table next to my left ear. His breath breezed over my neck.

We were silent for a long while as my nervous system got control of itself. I was relieved that it could. This wasn't a good setting for cuddling, and Edward eventually pulled back, forcing another loud groan from me. As I struggled to sit up, he retrieved the robe from the divan where it had landed and some towels, and adjusted the table so it was level again. He padded his lap with the towels and I clambered on cautiously, then he draped the robe around me.

"What was that?" I asked, nestling my head into the curve of his neck. "It was … intense."

"It was a C," Edward replied, and I felt a spike of hurt before I understood.

"Oh, this is the Cullen Scale of Vampiric Sexual Response again?" We had been D to G, I remembered - A to C beyond my ken, post-G beyond my endurance.

He put on a frown. "We'll have to think of something else. That doesn't make a good acronym _at all."_

I snorted. "Yeah, we should get right on that…. Seriously, why a C? I mean, why would_ I_ have that response?"

He sounded thoughtful. "Perhaps the angle meant that you felt more?"

"Or maybe," I decided to be a smartass, "all our practicing is making you better at this?"

To my surprise, he didn't take up the gauntlet. "That is my understanding as to why women want fuck buddies," he said, his tone matter of fact.

"What?"

"It's a term used in a type of relationship in which…." he started to explain as he so often had to. My own personal "Sex for Dummies" guide. Or maybe my own Doctor Ruth.

"No, no, I've heard of that," I stopped him, grinning. "It's just something else to hear you say the phrase."

"Fuck buddies," he promptly repeated, and I had to giggle into his neck.

"What's everyone else doing?" I asked when my giggles trailed off.

"Same thing we are. Shtupping."

I didn't need to know Yiddish to figure that out.

"Edward," I asked tentatively, "how did you know what I needed, before? You kept me together."

He rubbed his finger on my love bite, all the concealer washed away; what must have the masseuse thought? "Because you looked the way I sometimes feel when we're making love, that I'm on the edge of falling to pieces –" I nodded to confirm his diagnosis – "and it was frightening when it first happened, to fear that you're losing yourself. The next time it happens you won't be as disoriented."

I gave him a genuine frown, annoyed with myself that I had been oblivious to his distress, troubled by my own weakness. "I'm not strong enough to help you," I said, frustrated.

"You are," he replied. "Your sounds and your words ground me, as I've told you before. You are what I need." He paused a second and his arms tightened around me. "Is something bothering you? Mayra thought you were very tense at times."

Crap, he had monitored her mind from the hammam, and I had indeed thought during the massage about the tremors and how I needed to find a way to talk to Carlisle. I tried to sound puzzled. "Certainly not now that she's done with me," I said. "Wait," I went on, thinking of the lingerie episode with Alice that morning, and seizing on it as a diversion, "were you watching me?"

"Of course." He was unrepentant. "I was picking up pointers."

"Is voyeurism legal in France?"

"If I had the choice, I would see only you." He adjusted me on his thighs. I guessed he'd liked what he'd seen. And I couldn't bring myself to mind it.

"Since I have more privacy from you than anyone else in the world does, I probably shouldn't complain," I said. "Edward, why did you want me to have a massage here? Was it just to keep me occupied?"

"No, this seemed a good opportunity for you to have a massage from a human, since you won't be able to afterward. And afterward, you won't get sore, so it'll be a different experience."

"I could give _you_ a human massage now," I suggested as I slid off his lap, shrugging off his too-large robe so I could wrap one of the towels around me and tuck the end into my cleavage.

"I think you'd find it rather hard."

I wondered if that was deliberate. "I hope so," I purred, hamming it up.

He lifted an eyebrow. "Hmmm, I do have an ache in one particular part of my body…."

I giggled and gave him a peck. "We always sound like we're 13."

"I assure you, I never sounded like this when I was 13. Or any other year with a 3 in it," Edward said, and stood up. "Give me a minute?"

He batted the table, and it jetted across the floor, stopping in its original position. _Nice. _Next there was a splash from the hot tub - Edward warming up for me.

I took care of some business myself, then went to fetch the bottle of lotion that Mayra had left behind on a stool in the corner. As I turned back around, I saw Edward stretched out on his stomach, his hands under his right cheek slightly propping up his damp head. God, he was gorgeous. He was also much too distracting. I hurriedly covered him below the waist with a sheet.

His hand flashed back to catch my wrist, and he drew me closer so he could kiss my palm. "Don't hurt yourself," he murmured.

I tried to remember what Mayra had done to me. I put my hands on the junctures of his neck and shoulders and attempted to knead his muscles, but of course I got nowhere, though I did elicit a very satisfying spasm. I put some lotion on my palms and ran them along his back and arms. Since his skin didn't absorb the lotion, a little went a long way. I experimented with different touches: He shivered when I grazed his skin with my fingertips. He shuddered when I used my nails on his scalp. He groaned when I ineffectually pushed the heels of my hands into his triceps. I was supposed to be the masseuse here, but I was the one getting worked up. I couldn't stop myself from pulling off the sheet and kissing down his back to the end of his spine.

"So, Miss, where did you get your training?" Edward's voice startled me from my trance.

"The uh, Shiva Tantric Massage Institute in, uh, Goa," I improvised after a moment. Christ, could I do this?

"You have an unusual technique," he observed, his body shaking slightly under my hands.

"We believe in a, um, holistic approach. Not just hands, but all parts of our body can be beneficial in massage."

"So this is all part of the standard treatment?"

"Oh, you wanted the standard massage?" I asked, lifting my fingers from his sacrum. "I had thought you wanted the total body treatment. I'm sorry, sir. I'll just move on to your feet now -"

"No, continue on," he interrupted. "It just wasn't what I expected."

"Very well, sir."

I ran my hands over the hard arcs of his buttocks, and again, and his hips lifted for a moment. I lowered my mouth to his body, and muttered in warning, "_All_ parts of our body can be beneficial," before scraping my teeth across his skin. It worked. He hissed but stayed still, so I raised my head and dared slipping my fingers between his thighs, across the breathtakingly soft skin there and over his sac. His groan was muffled in the sheets, but it was still beautiful.

"It's vital to work the muscles of the perineum," I informed him. "We tend to neglect them."

"We wouldn't want that," he agreed, strain evident in his voice.

I moved down, over the muscles sculpturing his thighs, his calves, over the stone bones of his ankles and feet, each touch provoking a different ripple, a different noise. It was time for him to turn over, and anticipation twisted my belly.

Taking in a breath, I murmured, "Sir? Turn onto your back now, please." He gracefully complied, and I gazed at him stretched out for me on the table before I settled the sheet over his body again. I rubbed his hips for a few minutes, in the process brushing the back of my hand along the fabric covering his cock. It was indeed hard … to stay in character.

He jerked, and I apologized.

"I'm sorry, sir, please tell me if my hands are too strong," I said, trying to tamp down the lust in my voice.

"No, they're perfect," he said softly.

I breathed in again, and reminded myself that I had promised Edward a human massage. So I positioned myself by his head, and slid my hands into his hair once more. The pads of my thumbs rubbed his cheekbones, then crept down to the corners of his delectable mouth. Oh, hell. I leaned over and slowly touched my lips to his.

"There are important nerve endings in our lips," I said dreamily. "Stimulation is essential to keep them working properly."

He only exhaled in response, sending his sweet breath floating over my face, weakening my knees.

Across collarbones, over biceps, down strong forearms …. I lifted his right hand to my mouth, paused a second until his eyes widened in realization, then sucked in his middle finger, my tongue wrapping around it, my pulse speeding at his moan and the sight of his other hand sinking into the padding of the table.

"That feels so good …miss," he whispered.

I released his finger, which glided over my towel and along my nipple on its descent to the table, making me moan too.

His torso was next, and I gave up the pretense. My nose skimmed his chest, and I hungrily breathed in the scent concentrated where his heart once beat, and down a line of muscle to his navel and below. I longed to take him in my mouth, but the angle was wrong, so I contented myself with sliding my hand through the soft short hair around his cock and giving a swipe of my tongue down his length. There was a crunching noise - Edward's other hand had sunk into the table. I ducked down and snared the bottle of lotion from the floor but Edward stayed my hand as I tried to open it with trembling fingers.

"No lotion, please, miss," he said.

I was puzzled, but I nodded and returned to more interesting matters. My exploring fingertips discovered the wetness at his tip, and spread it to ease the passage of my hands on his length. The bucking of his hips nearly broke my hold, and I gasped out, "You seem to hold a lot of tension in this area … sir." His release spilled over then as he thrust into my hands with an agonized yell. My towel disappeared suddenly and I was lifted up and over so my pelvis aligned with Edward's and the table skittered and scraped on the floor.

"Edward," I cried out in surprise and delight, understanding now why he rejected the lotion, but my warm body betrayed me, recoiling slightly above his cooler one.

"Dammit," he groaned, and twisted us around so I was now lying on the table, stuffing scratching my arms, then he was gone, pulling me and the table over to the sauna. The table just barely fit inside, and Edward positioned it so it propped open the door. I felt the familiar red heat on my chest, then Edward landed above me as silently and lithely as a cat, his hands bracketing my shoulders, his cock wet and hard on my pubic bone.

"Is this all right?" he asked, lips talking on my neck, and I could only moan a yes. "Tell me," he commanded gently, "tell me the moment you feel faint," which was ridiculous considering that desire had already made my brain hazy. But I knew what he meant – he had been wary of the sauna ever since my heat stroke, or whatever it was.

He maneuvered us again so that I was straddling his waist, a breeze of cooler air from the doorway curving across my back. One thumb moved on my nipple, the other on my clit, in an impossible rhythm that made my body jolt. "I … need you," I managed to stutter out, and his hands were warm on my hips, lifting me up and down where I wanted to be.

"The fast thing," I murmured, and this time he didn't force me to describe it, happy to limit my exertion in the sauna. I flew above him effortlessly, blissfully, my eyes closed because they couldn't focus on his face.

"Bella?"

"Yes," I answered, and his hands moved faster, and it was beyond human, but the steady pace drove my human body to the edge. "Yes," I said again, then "Oh!" as our climaxes took us under.

Suddenly I was flying again, but it wasn't the same: the table collapsed under us, Edward propelling us off before it crashed into the wooden floor. We landed outside the sauna door and he held me upright as I assured him I was uninjured between giggles. "We killed the table," I snickered, and he finally laughed.

"That wasn't quite the post-coital afterglow I was aiming for," he said ruefully, pulling back to survey our bodies. We were extremely messy, sticky with him and me and lotion and bits of foam padding. "Let's shower and get this stuff off both of us."

Afterward we investigated the rectangular pool, which turned out to be tepid salt water, so saline that I floated easily. Edward didn't, though, and he took the opportunity to manipulate my body as I had his for the "tantric" massage. I felt inclined to stay there for hours more, but he was unaccountably eager for me to try the jacuzzi.

The tub was deliciously warm after the lukewarm pool, but I was uncertain how it would be any different from our jacuzzi back home: there were bubbles, and buffeting plumes of water and –

"Oh," I said in wonder. "Is that a French thing?" For there was one tiny but powerful jet positioned to hit me perfectly if I could stay in place.

"Perhaps," Edward said as he stepped behind me, but he didn't seem inclined to discuss it further. Instead he held me still between his thighs, adjusting me slightly so the jet massaged different angles of my clit. I felt self-conscious at first, but his hands cupped my breasts and he murmured to me in Russian, and this time it was completely erotic, the flow of words a background to my breaths and moans and my final cry. I had to wriggle away from the jet, and when he turned me around and I pressed against his ready length, I pulled back from the feeling and I saw a flash of disappointment.

"It's sensitive," I explained, surprised, then grinned. "I apparently prefer your fingers to motors. Get on the ledge?" I suggested. He did so, and I had him cage me between his legs again so I could make him groan at my mouth on him. He may have always been good at this, but I was getting better.

We dried off and adjourned to the divan then, taking advantage of his temporary warmth to tangle our legs.

We were silent a while as I nuzzled his chest and thought about how he had asked this morning if what he was doing was cheesy. God. This morning. That seemed like two months ago.

"Earlier today, during our ... French lesson - which was very _instructive_, by the way - you were unsure for a moment, and I wondered why?" I asked. "I mean, I'm unsure of myself all the time, but you seem so comfortable with everything."

"You know you have no reason to be unsure of yourself."

"I accept that in theory, but it's apparently congenital. And we're talking about you, not me."

He looked ready to argue, but decided against it. "You know that what I know is purely theoretical," he said.

I looked at him significantly.

"Okay, less theoretical now," he acknowledged. "So. I know some things seem to work pretty well. People fantasize about fellatio, naturally" - he winked at me - "but they also remember quite fondly having it or doing it. Or cunnilingus. Or making love in different positions — though God knows there's a lot of daydreaming about positions that could work only for vampires. Sometimes anal sex. You know, it's like Krafft-Ebing up here." He tapped his temple, as I tried to remember where I'd heard that name before. Oh, yes, one of the 19th-century Germans from good old psych class.

"But scenarios are a different animal," he went on. "People fantasize about having threesomes, but I've never happened to hear anyone thinking about how great having one was. Perhaps I've never encountered someone in a truly polyamorous relationship."

"Are fantasies about masseuses with unusual techniques common?"

"Yes."

"Are they successful in reality?"

"The massages themselves leave something to be desired, but in the correctly chosen establishments the clients derive a certain amount of satisfaction. It's a good thing they can't read minds."

"Oooh, I hadn't thought of that," I said. "I guess that means no titty flops for you." Strippers thinking of their bills and their children and when the damn night would finally be over…

He laughed harder than I expected, and I looked at him curiously. "That's a phrase I never would have expected to hear you say," he said. "The mixture of what you know, and what you don't know … it's utterly charming."

"Titty flop," I repeated, to his amusement. "So, vampire positions? Have we done some?" I asked, realizing how inexperienced I sounded even as I said it.

"You may recall that earlier this evening we spent some time on that piece of furniture over there –" he waved at the remains of the massage table, which he had dragged out of the sauna.

"Twice," I agreed.

"Yes," he said. "For the first time ... no human man could have stayed in that position without his knees collapsing."

"Really?"

"Really. And you don't realize because you have been spoiled by my vampire prowess."

I wrinkled my nose at him. "And the second time?"

"That's more a matter of recovery time," he said airily.

"So we have an abnormal amount of sex?"

I was joking, mostly, but his gaze darkened. "Not abnormal for us. It's the perfect amount for us."

_No_, I thought, _it's not enough for you. It's not enough for me either. If I didn't have to sleep or eat or spend hours on homework ..._

"One-nights stands seem to end badly," he went on. "I've seen a lot of bad reactions to women greeting their husbands wearing only Saran Wrap…" He paused on seeing my baffled look. It sounded horrible. "That was a fad in the '70s. So I wondered if I was sounding like Pepe Le Pew this morning."

"Who?"

He looked at me in shock. "You don't know? The cartoon skunk? Heaven help me, I married a child. Do you remember what you were doing when Cobain died?"

I whacked him with a pillow. "And you're so damned old. Though it's true, I don't remember – I was probably listening to Barney when he died."

He winced.

"You didn't have to watch 'Barney,' did you?" I asked.

"No, that was Emmett's responsibility. But then he repeatedly sang that song to us –"

"_I love you, you love me?"_

"Please don't," he begged. "I don't want to associate your voice with that abomination."

"_I feel stupid, and contagious_," I screeched out instead and he understandably winced again. "But isn't that line supposed to be about the Beatles?"

"Yes, but I thought I should make allowances for your extreme youth."

"What were _you _doing?"

"I had just dissected a cadaver, and heard the news during a break," he said. "I was in San Francisco, in medical school. Again. That's one reason it's Rosalie's turn this time."

"There's another reason?"

"Certainly. So I could have more time with you."

He tangled his fingers idly in my hair or tapped notes on my hip as we talked and teased, his face content and open and young, and I realized with a burst of guilt that I hadn't seen him so relaxed since classes started. "Relaxed" was always a relative term for Edward: he always carried a weight of responsibility - providing for his family, safeguarding his identity and that of his siblings, and perhaps the heaviest burden, protecting me from errant cars and microbes, random human predators and scheming vampires … and himself. Probably only when he lost himself in hunting, and moments like these, when hours of intimacy had briefly sated him, did he come close to fully relaxed.

But he had been so careful to make sure I had time and energy to go to school and travel that he had not allowed himself such moments. Time was showing me that his desire for me was unbounded, that mine for him would be as well - perhaps Rosalie was right, we were being unnatural, and it had to be torture for him. And I had to set a date myself, because he never would ask me to.

But first things first. "Edward, when we get back to Hanover, can we spend the weekend just like this?" I asked. "No trips, no restaurants, no work - just this?"

"Truly? We could visit Renee again; the weather looks promising for that."

"Truly. Just this."

"You do need to sleep and eat –"

I groaned a bit and raised my hand to interrupt him. "Lunch today was delicious, but right now the idea of eating ever again just doesn't sound that appealing."

"Oddly enough, I feel the same way," he said, grimacing.

"I bet you do," I said sympathetically. "So … next weekend? It's a date?"

A smile spread slowly across his face. "It would be my pleasure."

Mine, too.

* * *

_A/N: Did you see Peter Murphy in "Eclipse"? I don't know if he hasn't aged well, or if it's the usual horrible makeup for the vamps in these movies, but Alice would be so disappointed._

_You have about a day to vote in the Vampies, so go check out the entries: __twificpics__ (dot) com/vampawards/?page_id=198_

_*The French: E: Good evening, we're the Cullens. The rest of us will be here shortly.  
Woman: Of course. Everthing is ready just as you requested, but perhaps you'd like a massage yourself? I could -  
Mayra tells Bella, "I'll be back soon," and "Rest for a few minutes."_

_Lusophone= Portuguese speaker _

_I put a little joke in here at my expense. Sorry I'm so slow. I'm going on vacation shortly (near Hanover, coincidentally) but I don't know if that'll make me faster or slower._

_As always, thanks for reading. I tried to send teasers to those of you who reviewed – forgive me if I missed you._


	14. Chapter 14: URO

_Disclaimer: This isn't mine, except what's mine._

* * *

Chapter 14: URO

_She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her ..._

-The art critic Walter Pater on the "Mona Lisa" in "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873)

* * *

In the end, Carlisle came to me.

But first, there were many more things to do in Paris. To give my feet a rest, Edward and I rented bikes from a Vélib station one morning before a rainy afternoon and rode in the nearest big park, the Bois de Boulogne. I'd never seen Edward on a bike, but he was as graceful at riding as he was everything else, even too much so. We stopped for a kiss when we were alone in a wooded section where not even prostitutes lurked, my helmet knocking harmlessly into his head, and realized only afterward that he had never put his feet on the ground. A few minutes later, as we approached a bridle path, he had me stop.

"You'll want to see this," he said, "and I can't be too close, even downwind." I looked at him behind me in bafflement, then turned back to the bridle path to see a dozen preschoolers, shrieking with laughter, bouncing and clutching the manes of tiny shaggy ponies roped together and trotting vigorously.

They were adorable. And I would never learn how to ride a horse.

As the children and their instructor disappeared, I twisted round again to Edward, who had retreated quite a distance down the road, a hint of wistfulness on his face.

"I was on a horse once," I said, and he looked retroactively alarmed. "I hit my head on the saddle horn and had a bruise on my cheek for days. I don't need any more equestrian experience," I assured him.

I had to make two return visits to Mme Coigny for bra fittings, glaring at Alice the whole time. Edward offered to be my translator in her stead, which was such an alluringly unwise idea that I told him that I'd let him give me a private fitting when I returned.

And, of course, I ate. I ate tiny pastel almond-paste cookies in a Belle Epoque tearoom. I ate sweetbreads and scrambled eggs with truffles at a tiny new bistrot. I ate an obscene number of oysters and little snails that Edward winkled out of their shells for me with a pin, holding his breath, in a giant 1930s restaurant gleaming with brass. I ate couscous in the Marais and pho in Belleville. And when I couldn't abide sitting at yet another table, I ate crepes and roasted chestnuts from street carts. The mild nausea that I'd experienced since my lunch at Taillevent persisted, disappearing while I ate, but a vaguely annoying background presence between meals.

Fortunately, there was so much to see that I was able to ignore that.

We visited the Musée d'Orsay, and I barely suppressed my giggles as we paid the reduced admission for 18- to 25-year-old non-Frenchies. "You really should get in free as an under-18," I observed when we were safely away from the ticket booths.

"No, I should get a senior citizen discount," he responded. "Or I could show my French passport."

"You have a French passport?" I asked as quietly as I could, momentarily arrested in my gawping at the barrel vaults and glass gridwork in the ceiling that showed the rainy sky above. The old train station had been turned into a stunning background for art.

"I have many passports,' he said just as quietly.

"How Jason Bourne of you," I teased him. "Have you often had to sneak across borders and smuggle out dissidents?"

"Not for several decades," he said. "You should ask Jasper to show you _your_ passports."

I contemplated that in silence for a moment before he went on, "Come, let's look at some truly wretched paintings."

"Don't hold back, Professor Cullen."

By now, it was no surprise to find that vampires despised the French Academic painters. Cabanel's "Birth of Venus" seemed to cause Edward physical pain – he rubbed his temples and even clutched his stomach as I examined the goddess slyly lounging on her seafoam. And sure, maybe the painting had no higher aspirations than to be a really pretty, very racy illustration, but it was impressively done.

When we came to the Bouguereau version of the same subject, Edward simply turned his back. Unfortunately for him, he still had to hear our fellow visitors exclaim in all the languages he knew over how charming the painting was, and wonder mentally why the poor model's body hair had gone to Brazil. Edward told me how a Victorian British art critic, used to seeing similar paintings, had been so shocked on his wedding night that he had been unable to consummate his marriage.

"So you see," Edward concluded without any justification, "the Academic painters were evil."

I laughed (and was silently thankful that my own marriage was able to be consummated), but after more paintings and a ballroom full of naked-lady statues, I was ready to agree that French art buyers under Napoleon III would have been just as happy with a copy of Playboy. We both breathed a little more easily when we got to the smaller, plainer rooms that housed the Impressionists.

Our visit to the Louvre involved all the Cullens, and I was grateful that better minds than mine would be navigating the museum's maze of buildings. Our first stop wasn't what I would have predicted, though.

Alice led the way to the tall stairway rising to the headless "Nike of Samothrace" (second-century B.C. Greek Winged Victory, remarkable treatment of drapery, thank you Art History 101) perched on her limestone ship's prow. I started ascending in Alice's wake, but Edward held me back, and I turned to see that the Cullens were waiting in a cluster next to a massive pier.

"Stand aside for a moment, because Alice loves doing this," Edward said with affectionate resignation. I lifted my eyebrows at him, but by then Alice had reached the top of the crowded staircase. She turned around and then practically flew down the steps, her stilettos clacking rapidly on the marble, arms above her head and a large red chiffon scarf streaming from her hands. The whole thing took only a few seconds, but my heart was in my throat even though Alice was so confident and indestructible, because a human who tripped doing this maneuver would surely end up a paraplegic.

Most of the museum-goers looked at Alice with a mix of bafflement and alarm, but an elderly American couple dressed alike in khakis and polo shirts joined in the Cullens' polite applause. "Just like Audrey Hepburn," the woman said in admiration, and Alice beamed and thanked her prettily.

"As you can see, no one under 60 gets the reference," Edward whispered to me to tease his sister, and Alice scowled at him.

"'Funny Face,' 1957," she said loftily. "A classic. I'll lend my copy to _you_, Bella."

The "Nike" was situated next to the ornate Galerie d'Apolon, and Esme, Alice and Rosalie veered off to look at the royal jewels in their glass case in the center. I followed, but the crowns and necklaces didn't hold my interest for long and I drifted away to join the men at a window on the Seine. A rare example of division by gender lines among the Cullens, I thought. Well, not anymore.

"You really don't care much about jewelry," Edward said as I nestled into his torso and looked out on the river.

"I would have thought that my failure to realize that your mother's heart charm was a diamond would have been as much proof as you needed of that," I said, and he grimaced briefly as I called him out on that gift. "Besides, gem extraction is very bad for the environment."

"Indeed it is. You should stick to vintage," Edward responded, rubbing his thumb along my engagement ring.

"Only things from 1901," I agreed.

A snicker from Emmett suggested that we were moving into sappy territory. But sometimes we couldn't help it.

When the women finished their window shopping, a quick, quiet debate ensued over our itinerary, a discussion that I couldn't follow. At the end, Rosalie huffed, "Fine, at least it's nearby," and stalked off toward the Italian galleries.

I heard a buzz of excited voices before I saw anything. A crowd was gathered in a large gallery, a guard imploring in vain, in English, "No flashes!" An opening finally allowed me to see what the focus of all the attention was: the "Mona Lisa," the much stolen painting protected by a plastic box. Edward guided me through the throng so I had an unobstructed view, and I experienced that deflated feeling of familiarity from having seen too many reproductions and parodies. That poor woman. I soon nodded my readiness to leave, and joined the rest of the family, who hadn't even bothered to come into the room.

Rosalie looked disgusted, Esme sympathetic. "Disappointing, isn't it?" she murmured.

Once we got away from the traffic jam around the "Mona Lisa," the galleries emptied out considerably. Many of the rooms for the French collection were deserted and the Cullens would scatter as they entered each one, heading straight to their favorite work, statues staring at paintings. Esme and Carlisle were both drawn to religious scenes and landscapes, but the other couples split up – Jasper, I noticed, loved paintings of battlefields and Alice portraits, Rosalie favored genre pictures and Emmett focused on hunts. Edward stayed by my side as I wandered, watching my face, occasionally asking me for my reactions, even timing, I'd bet, how long I looked at each work. I eventually reached my limit, Edward and I leaving the rest of the Cullens for my lunch, secure in the knowledge that I'd have many more opportunities to see – and remember – everything here.

A few nights later I had my introduction to opera, sitting between Edward and Esme at the Opera Bastille watching Poulenc's "Dialogues des carmélites." I had wondered why Edward thought my first opera should be this instead of "The Barber of Seville" or some other work whose famous bits I might have heard sampled in a rap song or in a movie, but it became a littler clearer to me in the last act, when Sister Blanche chooses to die with her fellow nuns marching serenely off to the guillotine, victims of the Reign of Terror. I heard the woman behind me sniffling, while Esme and Carlisle looked heartbroken. I wasn't sure I liked opera, let alone Poulenc, but there was no denying the emotional impact of Blanche's decision. Through my own tears, I gave my husband a dirty look.

"I have to try," he said under the applause as I handed him back his freshly damp handkerchief. "Death, even a chosen one, _is _sad. And frightening."

"But Blanche is noble in choosing it," I pointed out.

He paused for a moment. "I may be guilty of sending a mixed message," he acknowledged.

The siblings were just down one of the boulevards radiating from the Place de la Bastille, at a concert by the band we'd seen a few months ago in Brooklyn at the club where the Georgian vampire tried to toy with me. We all joined them for the tail end of the show, in a former theater with peeling paint and decaying woodwork, and it was a rare chance to see Carlisle act like a 23-year-old. Tieless and jacketless now, his ivory shirt untucked, he looked a bit like an extraordinarily handsome first-year law firm associate cutting loose after work, moving effortlessly to the music with Esme next to him glowing in her silver-gray sheath, an otherworldly creature among all the black and boots of the crowd.

"I didn't know that Carlisle was such a fan of shoegaze," I couldn't help whispering to Edward.

Carlisle leaned over to me to say, "Reminds me of the madrigals of my childhood," and he was so straight-faced it took me a second to realize he was joking.

The four of us caught the last metro home, but apparently the night with our family wasn't quite over. When we arrived back at the Place des Etats-Unis, Esme returned to the main apartment while Carlisle followed us upstairs.

"Carlisle, do come in," Edward said dryly, unlocking the door.

"Thank you," Carlisle said, smiling at me reassuringly as Edward helped me out of my coat. We moved into the salon, Carlisle dropping fluidly into the striped armchair, Edward sliding in next to me on a sofa, his gaze intent on his father. The light from the sconces reflected on the French windows, obscuring our view of the city.

"It's going to be sunny tomorrow –" Carlisle started.

"No," Edward interrupted, his face hardening. "It's not safe."

"They have proved themselves -" Carlisle protested.

"They have," Edward conceded, speaking just slowly enough that I could understand him. "But they were Danielle's –"

"And others. They should meet –"

"You now think there's a danger?" Edward said sharply, leaning forward.

"I think it would be sensible, considering what happened –"

"But Jean-François would be able –"

"I would wager that he cannot," Carlisle interrupted. "But in case he can we should -"

"Yes," Edward said heavily. "But immediately. Then we go –"

Their staccato, elliptical half-mental conversation was starting to worry me and annoy me in equal measure. I coughed loudly and unnecessarily.

Carlisle looked at me apologetically and hastened to explain. "Bella, I am proposing that we go –"

"After your breakfast," Edward put in.

"Oh, yes, of course," Carlisle continued, "I am proposing that we head to Normandy in the morning to visit some friends."

"Carnivorous friends," I guessed, remembering that Edward had said only the Alaska coven shared the Cullens' diet.

"Yes, but as trustworthy as they get." Edward made a noise in his throat, and Carlisle added, "Edward, you know this. And after our encounter with Jane last summer, maintaining our ties with other covens is advisable."

"While I stay human, you mean," I said, and Edward stiffened.

"No," Carlisle said, shaking his head regretfully at me. "I agree with Edward. Your decision, your timing, should not be affected by this. The worries will simply be different, depending on your status. Aro will find you … worthy of his attention –"

"Carlisle!" Edward spat out suddenly. "When?"

"Just before we left to —"

"And you're telling me only —"

"Guys!" I barked in frustration. Carlisle flinched a little; I'd bet being called a guy was a novelty to him too.

Edward answered me this time, his voice angry. "Aro sent us a wedding present."

"Alice invited _Aro_?" I said, my voice rising an octave at the end. "I would have definitely vetoed that had I known."

"She saw that telling him of your marriage would temporarily salve his urge to check up on you," Carlisle blandly explained, but Edward erupted once more.

"That fiend would expect that," he seethed, and it took me a second to understand what he had heard in Carlisle's thoughts. Oh.

"Aro thought I'd be changed … um, one way or another afterward?" I asked.

"Yes," Carlisle said with a resigned sigh. "He responded to the news by sending you a rather large diamond and a note."

Ugh. I didn't want any gems from Aro. They probably literally _were _blood diamonds. And had vampire cooties. Anyway, what accompanied the diamond was more important. "What did the note say?" I asked.

"'I so look forward to seeing the new Mrs. Cullen in person,''' Carlisle recited.

Edward tensed at the implied threat, but Carlisle went on. "There is a silver lining, you realize – he sent his gift to Forks, not Hanover, so he doesn't seem to have been actively looking for you. Still, that note is one reason I paid respects to the Paris coven as well, for they have a certain level of rivalry with the Volturi, and it is useful to have them at our side. In truth, Jean-François and Danielle would side with us no matter what, but –" and he looked at Edward, "their country house is surrounded by forest, and Jasper should hunt before enclosing himself on a plane, as should the rest of us," he concluded, his eyes flickering to me.

Edward finally nodded in reluctant acquiescence, and Carlisle asked, "Bella, are you going to be all right with this?"

"If you are, yes. But where are the … people we're visiting on the creepiness scale? Is it Aro-level creepiness? Garsevan-level? Victoria-level?" I gripped Edward's hand in an effort to repress a shudder. After all, I'd never met a carnivorous vampire who wasn't scary as hell. "Vincent Price?"

Carlisle laughed at the last one, taking no offense. "I'm afraid that the vampire world hasn't given you a very good impression of itself," he said ruefully.

"I'm pretty sure that thanks to you I have the most positive impression of the vampire world a human could have," I said.

He winced, but answered, "True." He rose from the chair, and added, "Tomorrow, then. Sleep well, child."

Edward closed the door behind his father and sighed as he rejoined me on the sofa. I rested my cheek on the fine wool covering his shoulder. "Are _you_ going to be all right with this?" I asked. "I thoroughly agree with Carlisle's making efforts to bolster our position against Aro."

"Yes, but I wish it didn't involve exposing you to any vampires, even our friends."

I almost suggested that I stay in Paris while he went on this visit, but I knew the argument against that: in Hanover, Alice could see well in advance a vampire wandering into the area; in Paris, the vampires were already too close for peace of mind.

"At least the visit will probably prove educational," Edward went on. "Jean-François and Danielle have an impressive collection at their house."

I put my right hand in the center of his chest, and I could easily feel the tension coiled there. I had it too, and I knew what would help. "Speaking of educational, is there anything you'd like to teach me tonight?" I asked in feigned innocence.

He caught my hand and held it still. "You are trying to distract me."

"Indeed I am," I said and ran the back of my free hand just above his belt. "Is it working?" I asked, the feel of the perfect line of his abdomen making my voice husky.

"Hmmm, I suppose I have the energy to teach you a lesson or two tonight," he said, and rearranged me so I was on his lap and his cool lips were on my throat.

Despite his words, his body remained anxious at first, only gradually relaxing as skin met skin. It was a subtle difference, one I wouldn't have been able to detect in his stone flesh just a few months ago, one that perhaps only I would ever be able to discern.

"You're so easy," I teased him, my own fears ebbing at his touch.

"To the contrary," he said, moving my hand down and his mouth up to my ear, "I'm really rather –"

"No!" I squealed. "Don't say it!"

But he did anyway, my desire making his breath feel almost hot in my ear, and I groaned for more than one reason.

* * *

With Alice's approval, I walked over to the market street early the next morning to get my breakfast, feeling discombobulated navigating this strange city without Edward. The men and women presiding over the stalls and shops smiled more brightly today, obviously happy to see the sun after so many cloudy days, and I smiled too, appreciating its warmth in the brisker air, clear skies having lowered the temperature and making me grateful for my cashmere coat.

The voluptuous young brunette with a toque who handed me my warm baguette, though, looked disappointed. "Votre ami n'est pas là aujourd'hui?" she asked as I carefully counted out a euro and 30 centimes. I wasn't quite sure what she was saying, but I could easily guess she was wondering where Edward was. "Désolée, madame," I answered. I'd be disappointed too if I were her.

Edward was waiting for me in the lobby where I left him, stationed next to the wrought iron and glass door since the sun wasn't shining at a dangerous angle, another volume of Custine's memoirs in his hand, unread, I suspected. I felt a stab of guilt that I'd been able to enjoy walking around in the sun and he couldn't.

"You were missed at the market today, especially by Mademoiselle Baguette," I told him, showing off my shopping bag of bread and fruit after we kissed, and he chuckled at the idea before hissing out, "No, Alice."

"What is it?" I asked with the wariness of experience.

"No, no, don't worry," he said, his tone reassuring, "it involves the footsie."

"Okay, I like footsie," I said hopefully, and he laughed again.

"No, it's the nickname for the London Stock Exchange's version of the Dow Jones index. Alice has a proposal I disagree with."

"I thought you didn't bet against Alice."

"The Greeks said you shouldn't bet against the Delphic oracle, either, but that doesn't mean she understood what she was saying," he said, his eyes gazing upward as if they could bore through plaster and parquet into the Cullen apartment. "Years of breathing in the fumes had to have had an effect on her brain. Alice's having an … intuition doesn't mean we should sell anything if it just means we'll have to pay taxes on a wash sale." He sighed and headed to the elevator. "Will you be okay eating breakfast on your own, then joining us downstairs?"

"Sure," I said, as he pressed the call button for me. "So do tell, Mr. Cullen, what is the secret to your investment success?"

"Buy low, sell high," he said, adding for Alice's benefit, "but you have to be judicious in doing both."

After breakfast I brushed my teeth again in case anyone with a sensitive nose took offense at a particularly pungent Roquefort. I wondered how long it would be before my stomach started making its vague complaints again. The door downstairs was unlocked, and I stepped into the main salon to find only Emmett, flipping rapidly through a newspaper as he sprawled on a settee upholstered with shepherdesses. It looked as if it should have collapsed under his mass, but I knew from the bed upstairs that French furniture was sturdier than it appeared … with the exception of massage tables.

Since I was asleep when we left the mikvah/spa/playroom, I hadn't seen how Edward had dealt with the results of that enjoyable bit of destructiveness. I did know that he had carried me home since the metro had stopped running for the evening, I and five other Cullens (Alice and Jasper had left the mikvah after the family steam bath to, Edward told me, spend some quality time on the roof of Notre Dame) probably looking as if we were reenacting a scene from a zombie movie. Edward assured me that the Parisians and drunken Americans they had passed had found them plausibly human, and only a pair of Romani boys who had sneaked out of one of the encampments on the edges of the city had suspected them of supernaturalness, spitting on the ground and prudently turning the other direction.

"Morning, Bella," Emmett said in greeting, standing up and folding his newspaper, preventing my mind from lingering on activities associated with massage tables. "Come on in and set a spell."

"Thank you kindly, Mr. McCarty," I answered, trying to mimic his farmer-from-the-1930s accent. It was quite at odds with his English-gentleman-at-a-house-party appearance: Emmett had on a tie and tattersall shirt under a beautiful Donegal tweed jacket, wearing it with an ease rare in such big men.

I sat on the sofa opposite him. "Where's Rosalie?" I asked.

"She's dressing. She's able to do that more efficiently when I'm not around, " he answered. I would have predicted a leer accompanying such a comment from Emmett, but he made it a simple observation instead.

"I know what you mean," I said agreeably. After all, watching Edward dress, or better yet, undress, was one of my life's pleasures. "Whatcha reading?" I asked, pointing to the newspaper. I half-expected it to be The Times of London in keeping with Emmett's getup.

"L'Equipe," he said, unfolding the paper to show a picture of two players battling for a soccer ball. "I have to keep up with le foot. It's the world's sport," he said in response to my look of surprise. "I've been to every World Cup since the war ... at least the night games."

Emmett had come a long way from the valleys of Appalachia, I thought. "Did it take you a while to get used to all this?" I asked, gesturing at the luxury surrounding us.

He seemed astonished by my question. "No, I loved it!" he said. "The thirst is … well, you have a slight idea, but having shoes and a roof that didn't leak, even if the lack of either no longer made me suffer, I accepted that right away." He looked at me thoughtfully. "You think of yourself as having grown up without a lot of money, but compared with my childhood, yours was quite comfortable. I'll show you."

He disappeared in a blur and returned half a second later with a newish-looking coffee table book. "Photographs of the Farm Security Administration: Images From the Great Depression," I read on the cover as Em plopped down next to me.

"Here," he announced, handing the book to me. It was open to a black-and-white photograph of an older woman in a shapeless flowered dress, sitting on a wooden chair on an unpainted porch; she was shelling peas, so it must have been springtime. A little girl at her feet was employed at the same task. The caption read, "Mrs. Lemuel McCarty and daughter, 1937, outside Gatlinburg, Tenn."

"That's your mother?" I asked, and he nodded. "And your … sister, really?"

"Yeah, Clara or Robbie Jean, I haven't been able to figure it out. My mother's only 38 in that picture," he said, reaching over to gently rub a fingertip on the glossy paper as if he could touch the people in the photograph. Wow, Mrs. McCarty was Renee's age and looked like Renee's mother. "You can see how her life aged her. I was her oldest child – that is, her oldest child to survive to adulthood."

"And your dad?"

"My father died of pneumonia some years before - that was before penicillin was available. Even if it had been, it wasn't as if we could afford much doctoring."

"You must have been hungry growing up," I blurted, glancing at his huge frame.

"Sometimes, probably," he said, shrugging. "Carlisle speculates that my family had more money during Prohibition, so I had enough food to grow to my full height." He stretched out his arms like a giant bird of prey extending its wings.

"Why Prohibition?"

"We had a still to make moonshine, a Silver Cloud. I even have a hazy recollection of tending the fire." He was silent for a moment. "I never made it past fifth grade – when I went to high school as a Cullen, it was my first time. If that bear hadn't found me, I would have died toothless and emphysemic a long time ago, or been shot by the revenuers or been cannon fodder for D-Day - that is, if I hadn't knocked up a neighbor girl and had a passel of brats before -"

His head snapped to the doorway of the salon and Rosalie was hesitating there, her expression hard … and guilty? Oh, the passel of brats. I felt a surge of irritation, even though I knew she couldn't help it – it was an ineradicable part of her nature now.

I turned back to Emmett, who gave Rosalie a significant look before continuing. "And if an angel hadn't found me after that bear did, I would just have been dead at 20," he said, his voice resolute. "So I can't think of any better outcome for me."

I guessed that Emmett wasn't thrilled about Rosalie's visit to the blood enzyme researchers.

Rosalie nodded at me and dropped into the shepherdess sofa as I asked Emmett, "So you carry this book around with you all the time?"

"Huh?" he muttered, his eyes still on his wife, his expression so ferociously loving that I wanted to avert my gaze. "No, this is the copy I keep here."

"Wait, this is your apartment?" I asked in confusion.

"Yeah," he answered. "You didn't know?"

"No, I just assumed we were renting for the week. So the fourth bedroom is actually for Edward," I mused. Emmett nodded. "But what about the apartment upstairs? Who owns that?"

"We do, but we normally have a tenant. Luckily it's between renters at the moment – and about time. The French rent-control laws are a real bitch. Esme probably spends more time on paperwork for this place than any of our other properties."

"Wait," I said again. "You own the whole building?"

"Yeah," he answered again. I shook my head and he laughed. "Maybe it'd be easier if you just assume we own everything."

"Do you own the Carlyle?"

"No, Carlisle doesn't approve of the way it's spelled." I looked at him dubiously. "Fine, it would be too conspicuous, owning a famous hotel."

"Okay, but if you're the owners of this place, then why doesn't Mme Douzy the concierge know who you are?"

"This building is like the house in Hanover – its official owner is a French company, so she doesn't know we pay her salary. We're just the eccentric rich people who rent this apartment."

"So these paintings are real, then," I said, waving at the canvas in a simple wooden frame on the wall across from me. It could have been used in a dictionary to illustrate the Cubism entry.

"Yep. That's a Braque."

"Aren't you worried that someone will steal these since you're not usually here?"

"If anyone does, we'll track him down and kill him."

I knew he was joking but I frowned at him anyway.

"All right," he amended, "when the pictures show up on the black market, Jean-François will tell us, and we'll track the thief down and kill him." He added in response to my furrowed brows, "Jean-François's an art dealer, a very discreet one."

I was still puzzled. "Is that code for fence?"

"Nah, I mean he's not flamboyant ... uh, perhaps that's not the right word. He invites clients to his house very occasionally, but he doesn't mount shows to get publicity or have a public gallery."

"And he doesn't eat his clients on these visits, I take it?"

"That would definitely not be discreet."

I found that I had crossed my arms across my chest defensively. "My objection, you realize, is to the killing part, not the method of tracking down part," I said for clarification.

"Hyperbole, that's all."

"Yes," I agreed, "but I'm a little on edge about our hosts."

"You'll be fine," Emmett said. "We've got your security all set up."

"No, you should be on edge," Rosalie interrupted, her tone unsympathetic. "They're not the worst of their kind, but they're killers, the vast majority of us are, and you should understand that before you make any decisions that are final. It's not just -"

But the rest of her words were just so much noise, for Edward appeared in the doorway then, achingly beautiful in another dark gray suit and white shirt unbuttoned enough to tease me with a sliver of his chest, his eyes tense but still warm on me. Before I could finish my sharp inhale, he was in front of me, his hand in mine, helping me up from the sofa.

"Ready to go?" he asked.

"Always," I said, my fears forgotten.

As we left the salon, I distantly heard Rosalie mutter, "Fuck it. I give up. Edward, she's all yours."

* * *

The siblings had moved the cars from the garage when they returned just before dawn, and now two Mercedeses with tinted windows were waiting for us in the covered passageway to the building's interior courtyard.

Edward opened the front passenger door for me as Carlisle and Esme slipped into the back seat. Edward drove out of the courtyard, Rosalie at the wheel of the car behind us, and we made our way onto the expressway that encircled Paris. The Mercedeses, which would stand out so much in Forks, didn't stick out here – we were surrounded by Audis and Saabs and Citroens and exquisitely tiny cars I'd never seen in the States. My old pickup would be the sore thumb.

Soon we turned off the Périphérique and headed northwest. As I fiddled with the heating controls, never needing to ask if anyone else in the car was comfortable, I heard soft sighs coming from the back seat. Edward glanced into the rearview mirror and grinned, and I looked over my shoulder to see Esme lounging gracefully, barefoot, her eyes closed and her legs draped over Carlisle's lap. He was running his hands up her calves, under her brown wool trousers, gazing intently at his wife. I felt a stab of envy – that was not something Edward could do to me without planning - and I turned back to stare out the windshield. Edward smiled again and reached over to caress my covered left thigh. Well, that felt pretty damn good too, and I sighed happily myself.

We passed a signpost for Giverny, and I asked if they had been to Monet's garden. Edward and Carlisle laughed, and Esme squealed.

"Do you like gardens, Bella?" she asked eagerly.

"Of course," I said, confused. "Who doesn't? How couldn't you?"

"Your husband doesn't," she announced, as Edward groaned beside me.

"Really?" I turned slightly to look at him. "But you like architecture, and art … you're such a cultured person -"

"He likes culture, but not cultivation," Esme cackled.

"I prefer my landscapes as nature intended," Edward started, "wild –"

"And full of deer and lions," Carlisle finished.

"Philistine," Esme declared, then leaned forward to ruffle Edward's hair before turning to me. "Giverny is lovely, though not at its best in November. We'll find the right summer day to come back. But we should really go to England; the gardens look best on cloudy days anyway, and there are so many of them. And so many beautiful gardens: Sissinghurst, Hidcote, Wentworth…"

"Sounds good," I said. "Edward, what will you be doing while Esme and I do the grand tour?"

"Closing my eyes and thinking of England," he said, and the occupants of the back seat laughed. _Great, I'm in a car with Carlisle and Esme laughing at a sex joke_. "Of course I'd come with you. After all, I do like some particular flowers, Bella. I've become very fond of freesia, and lavender –"

"Awww," Esme and Carlisle chorused.

"Wait," I said, suddenly burning. "Do you all smell that? It's not just Edward?"

"Of course," Esme said, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world. "Edward's not being poetic, you know. Everyone has a particular scent, and we can discern the various components of it, just as oenologists can taste the components for gunpowder or cassis or cinnamon in a Burgundy. Every vampire can detect the freesia, the honey, the lavender in you, quite separately from your blood. It's lovely. Don't be embarrassed, darling," she added, noting my cheeks. "We all have our aroma too, our particular flavors. What does Edward smell like to you?"

_Eau de sex, but there's no way I'm admitting that._ "Something indefinable, but delicious," I finally said. Edward chuckled beside me. Apparently, having his body odor discussed didn't bother him. "I don't smell the rest of you, though."

"No, because your senses are so dull," Esme said, but it wasn't a reproach, as it would be from Rosalie, just a statement of fact. "When I smell Edward, I smell -"

"Esme, perhaps we should let Bella find out on her own," Carlisle interrupted.

"Mmm, more romantic," she agreed.

This revelation about Edward made me think of another question. "Is there an art form all of you despise?" I asked. Music they seemed to like wholeheartedly, painting with some notable exceptions, but –

"Ballet," my three companions said instantly.

"Watching humans dance, even Nureyev and Tallchief …" Esme went on, shaking her head. "Even the most graceful are ludicrous."

"Except for you," Edward said gallantly.

"Especially me," I said ruefully.

"Not in my eyes," he responded with a smile before pulling my wrist to his lips for a soft kiss.

"So sweet!" Esme said in approval.

We eventually turned onto some country roads lined with a single row of denuded chestnut trees, fallow fields lying beyond that Esme said were yellow with rape or blue with flax in the summer. We slowed down to go through a village called Bosc-la-Forêt that would have looked as if it hadn't been touched since the 1820's if it weren't for the ugly 1950's café that seemed to be the sole commercial establishment there. The old man was smoking outside it was only person we saw as we crossed a lovely little arcaded bridge over a tributary of the Seine.

The land after the village was forested, explaining its name. Carlisle told me we were close and made a call on his cell, speaking in French too rapidly for me to catch any words.

A mile or so later, Edward pulled over at a wide gravel driveway whose iron gates stood open, and motioned Rosalie to precede him. His face wore a look of supreme concentration — he was listening as we followed the drive through the woods.

The forest thinned, then ended at an expanse of lawn that separated the woods from a symmetrically sprawling house, red brick edged with white stone quoins, gabled roof and tall French windows, the home of a 17th-century seigneur and his lady, it must have been once - it reminded me of the Place des Vosges in the Marais. Then I noticed the two men, one dark-haired, one blond, who stepped out onto the wide steps in front of the house as we followed the drive curving left and stopped in front of a single story building in the same red and white. It must have been the old stables, now empty of horses and probably full of expensive vampire-speed cars.

Edward was at my door a millisecond after the car stopped, and he wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close as we all walked on a bridge over the dry moat, across more lawn and up the steps. The air was colder and rawer here than in Paris. The two of us hung back amid the exchanges of murmured bilingual greetings and embraces - if Edward could have politely hidden me behind his back, I think he would have. Finally the babble died down, and everyone turned to us. I had to squint against the sparkle overload.

Because I'm shallow that way, my gaze was first drawn to taller of the two strangers, perhaps the most beautiful man I had ever seen after Edward and Carlisle. His dark brown hair flowed in waves almost to his shoulders; his skin had paled to a golden hue, and he had astonishingly thick eyelashes that framed brown eyes. Though he was as tall as Edward, his build was closer to Jasper's; he must have been changed in his early 20s.

I tore my eyes away to his companion, who was shorter by several inches, his blond hair in a ponytail, wearing a pink linen suit with a sky blue tie completely inappropriate for season or the temperature. He too was wearing contacts, which had turned his irises an arresting, if unlikely, shade of deep blue. He looked, I realized after a few seconds, like one of the Bouchers I'd seen at the Frick in New York, needing only knee breeches and a frock coat to fit in one of the bucolic scenes, perhaps looking up a lady's skirt as she flew by on a swing decorated with garlands. Women didn't wear panties then, I thought randomly, and wondered where Danielle was hiding.

"Bella, Jean-François" - Edward indicated the blond man - "and Daniel." Oh, I finally got it; there was no discernable difference to me between the masculine and the feminine versions of the name. "This, of course, is Bella," he continued, and Jean-François was directly in front of me, looking inquiringly at Edward before darting his eyes at me. Whatever was in Jean-François's mind reassured Edward, for he nodded, and Jean-François took my hands in his cold ones. His lips gave my cheeks a double kiss almost before I realized it, and he beamed.

"I am honored to meet the beautiful woman who was able to captivate our friend Edward," he said in heavily accented English. If he hadn't been French I would have accused him of gushing, but he made his excesses sound natural. "Daniel and I were delighted to hear of your marriage. Please accept our felicitations."

"Thank you," I mumbled, rather stunned as Daniel stepped forward, and after a hesitation, gave me a swift double kiss. "You are very welcome, Bella," Daniel answered. He had a beautiful baritone to match his face, his accent indefinable.

I shivered in reaction to his temperature and to be honest, my nerves. The touch of our hosts gave me a feeling that was probably roughly akin to getting in a cage with a tiger that, you'd been assured, wasn't hungry - at the moment. Jean-François noticed, and was all apologies. "Forgive my bad manners, you must be cold," he said. "Come inside, we've heated the petit salon for you."

I felt like a grubby production intern among the models for a photo shoot for Town & Country as our hosts ushered us inside, Alice in her wasp-waisted striped jacket and flaring miniskirt, Emmett in his country gentleman's finery, Daniel in a charcoal suit and blinding white shirt that matched Edward's.

We stepped into a entrance hall with marble checkerboard floor and a hunting tapestry, then Jean-François led us through a billiards room, a library, a variety of sitting rooms. The small salon was small only in comparison to the huge rooms that preceded it. And it was warm, and charming – Esme's houses were wonderful, but she simply didn't have the raw material that Jean-François and Daniel had. French windows provided views of the woods on one side and a topiary garden on the other; the white paneled walls were covered with small drawings and pastels, unassuming portraits of long-gone men in cravats and women in gowns. A marquetry card table was positioned among one of the groupings of Louis chairs, and Daniel immediately started distributing cards to Esme, Emmett and Rosalie.

"What a gorgeous house," I told Jean-François as Edward deposited my knapsack on a table and helped me shrug off my coat. I was definitely gushing myself.

"Merci. You've timed your visit well – we're about to go underground for a while, so we'll be giving this house up. My dear," he added hospitably as he indicated a sofa for me and Edward to sit on, "may I offer you some coffee? Tea? A Cognac for this cold day?"

"No, thanks," I answered, trying not to shudder at the thought of Cognac. I'd tried some after dinner with Edward a few days ago, and could abide no more than a sip.

"Well, well," Jean-François said in a tone of mild surprise. Daniel and most of the Cullens erupted into applause, Em hooted, Rosalie rolled her eyes and Edward, I saw, looked a little smug ... as he had in Volterra, when Aro discovered my mind was impervious to his.

I stood up and gave an exaggerated curtsey to my audience. "You have a talent, I take it," I said to Jean-François when I resettled myself. "Was I … supposed to choose the Cognac?" He nodded and sat in an armchair opposite Edward and me.

"That's why Jean-François isn't allowed to play cards with the grown-ups," Emmett said as he arranged his hand.

"I can influence people's decisions, a useful ability in my profession," Jean-François said. "It's a mental version of Jasper's talent, I believe, and Carlisle tells me you're immune to mental talents?"

"So far," I said. Knock on wood, I thought, struck by the fear that I'd somehow screw up my change and end up talentless and useless. In response, Jean-François just stared at me with that unnerving vampire stillness.

"Um," I said awkwardly, "so how do you know the Cullens?"

Jean-François looked at Edward instead of me. "Edward! I'm hurt," he said in mock indignation. "You haven't told your blushing bride all about me?"

"She knows the most salient fact," Edward said pointedly, and Jean-François shrugged, though not apologetically. "Besides, I wouldn't want to deprive you of a chance to recount a story."

"Since you insist," he said, though we hadn't. Jean-François leaned forward, while around the card table across the room the others carried on their own conversations. "To put it bluntly, Carlisle saved me from having my head wrenched off by the Volturi," he said, and I flinched a little. "My story starts when I was 25, the seigneur of St.-Just, and a few other villages in the Loire Valley - you should visit it, Bella, it's a lovely area south of Paris. My life was good: I was too low-ranking to be required at Louis XV's court; my lands were productive enough that I could indulge my passion for horses; I had produced two sons and could now ignore my wife. I was the master of my little corner of France.

"One late summer day I was returning from visiting a young man in one of my villages. The sun was shining and I was riding in the woods on my best horse, Pégase - Pegasus to you - and suddenly teeth were scraping open my neck ..."

He paused and I imagined he was remembering the pain of the bite. "I don't know who it was, if it was even male or female," he continued. "But Pégase sensed my assailant before I did and somehow managed to flee with me to one of my fields where the harvesters were out in force. My people found me, I gather, took me to the chateau and watched over me for three days. I awoke at night, with a raging thirst and only my children's nurse in the chamber. I'm grateful that I didn't attack Mme de St.-Just and my sons, for it's only because of her prudent management and their survival that St.-Justs remain on my land today …

"When I was done, I leapt from the window and into the forest. But I was untutored and conspicuous, and the Volturi soon heard of me. They sent Carlisle, Demetri and Felix to track and subdue me. Demetri and Felix were in favor of ending me and going home, but Carlisle persuaded the other two to let me live - he thought I might be amenable to his peculiar diet.

"Carlisle was wrong, of course," Jean-François said, fluttering his hand dismissively, "but I admired him in other ways, at how comfortable he was around humans. I had been a sociable man before the attack, and once my thirst was under control, I wanted to have some possibility of society. Since I could no longer be around horses, I eventually turned to art, and found I had a good eye for young artists who were a good investment. Carlisle has an early Manet I acquired for him, for example."

The Manet in our cottage, I realized. Edward slid his cell from the inside pocket of his jacket and examined the number. "The footsie," he announced, prompting Alice to chirp in glee across the room. "Excuse me for a moment."

I was happy that he moved only a few steps away. "Yes, Gordon," he snapped in impatient investor mode, his eyes remaining intent on me.

"He's très protective of you," Jean-François observed, startling me.

I regarded him skeptically for a moment. "Considering the company, surely you can understand," I said. "Besides, he has had to save me a few times."

"Vraiment? Tell me."

"Are you doing all this for my benefit?" My nerves seemed to be making me irritable, and idiotically bold. Next to Alice, Jasper lifted his eyebrow at me.

"What?" Jean-François asked.

"The accent. If my experience with the Cullens is any guide, you have a flawless American or British accent. Or South African, for all I know."

"I do, oui," he replied. "But zuh clients adore mon accent français!"

"I'm not a client. I can't afford your paintings."

"If my experience with the Cullens is any guide," he parroted my words earlier, "you could buy my entire inventory. Which reminds me, I need to have a conversation with Alice…." he added as I stared at him. Edward routinely left account statements on top of my dresser before he shredded them, but I'd refused to look at them, fearing I'd get dizzy if I read the numbers. Jean-François's remark put the Cullens' wealth into a new realm.

"However, if it makes you more comfortable, I'll sound like a chinless British aristocrat," Jean-François drawled. He suddenly sounded like Prince Charles. "Now, _do _tell me about your adventures."

"Misadventures, more accurately," I grumbled, but I launched into my tale, knowing here was my chance to gain his sympathy. I spoke uncertainly at first, then with more confidence as Edward rejoined us and Jean-François seemed to drink in my words. I described how Edward had saved me from Tyler's van and the thugs in Port Angeles and James and then Victoria. I skipped over our time in Volterra and, more important, the wolves, since it wasn't my secret to share.

"You seem to have a bizarre fascination for our kind," Jean-François said when I finished my edited version of the newborn fight, unknowingly echoing Jane's words. I shuddered as I always did whenever something reminded me of that malevolent child.

"You can tell him about Volterra, love," Edward said quietly. "It's only fair that he knows."

Jean-François's unnaturally blue eyes widened in anticipation. "Ah, I do love a good Aro story, preferably one in which the greedy little tyrant is put in his place," he said. "He feels that he should have first refusal on my paintings, and without negotiations on the price."

"Is he still angry with you over selling that Ricciardo to the Met?" Edward asked.

"Greedy little tyrant," Jean-François repeated. "Do tell, Bella."

"Um, you're sort of harboring a fugitive, since I might have passed my expiration date. Edward, can you?" I pleaded. "You have more …context than me." Actually, I wasn't sure I could tell that story – it still hurt too much, even though we survived, even though we were together now. Edward nodded, and gave a succinct accounting that left Jean-François thoughtful.

"Aro will try to get you back, sooner or later," he said. He looked at Edward. "But I see that I'm not telling you anything you don't already know."

"I'm all too aware of that, yes," Edward said, and we were silent for a moment.

"Jean-François, Daniel," Carlisle called out, "we were hoping to take advantage of your woods while we were here, if that's acceptable to you."

"I expected as much," Jean-François answered, then walked to a corner, pulling out a topographical map from a rectangular wooden box with narrow drawers. He laid the flat paper on a sofa table and Esme, Jasper, Edward and I gathered around it. Our hosts' land adjoined a national forest, and Jean-François pointed out areas where hiking trails had been recently blazed. I suspected that if I hadn't been there, he would have been much more macabre about the dining possibilities offered by hikers.

"What will you hunt?" I asked.

"Red deer," Edward said without a great deal of enthusiasm. "There are no predators here, so the forests are overrun."

"The boar are in rut," Jean-François put in, wrinkling his nose. "Isn't that a little better?" His tone suggested that "a little better" wasn't very appetizing.

"Jean-François," Esme chided him. "It wouldn't hurt you to try it. Well, boys, shall we?"

Three spouses saw off three hunters, who promised us they wouldn't be long and blurred through the gardens and lawns before disappearing into the brush. Carlisle took Esme's place at the card table, and I sat down next to Alice.

"What are you playing?" I asked.

"Bridge," Daniel answered as he dealt. "The Cullens know that they have to play on their visits to us. I seize any opportunity when I have enough company for a table … without cheats."

"And then he ignores me," Jean-François said mournfully, which is just what Daniel did. "So it is up to you to entertain me, Bella. Tell me where your husband has been taking you."

Figuring he didn't want to hear about my dinners, I described the intensive art education Edward was giving me. I was relieved to find that Jean-François didn't entirely agree with Edward about which painters were most admirable — he was fond of the Caillebotte I had liked so much in Chicago, of the rainy day in Paris.

"I find it a charming painting," Jean-François said, "but perhaps that's because it reminds me so strongly of the first decade I spent with Daniel." Daniel dropped his pretense of ignoring his mate and gave him a fond look.

I went on to describe what we had seen in Paris, and Jean-François praised my unimpressed reaction to the "Mona Lisa."

"That is because you have excellent taste, Bella," he said. "Leonardo is a disgrace to vampires." There were murmurs of agreement around me.

It took a few seconds for that to soak in. "Leonardo _da Vinci_?" I asked stupidly.

"Mais oui," Jean-François said to tease me.

"But his paintings," I protested, again mentally picturing La Joconde in her sad little glass box. "They're not like Ricciardo's paintings."

"Let's just say that as an artist, Leonardo was a very good inventor," he snorted. "That's why you actually see his works in the museums rather than hidden away in Volterra," casually dismissing the world's most famous painter. "He's always asking me to sell some of his paintings, and I always turn him down."

This was too much. "You're joking, right?" I asked.

"Yes," he conceded. "I have stored several 15th-century canvases for him to scrawl on. My commission alone would be extraordinary …" he trailed off, calculating.

"Where is he now?" Carlisle asked from the card table. "I haven't seen him in ages." I wondered if Carlisle might mean that literally.

"Electronic Arts," Jean-François answered as if that said everything.

Rosalie took pity on me and explained: "Computer geek is not a bad role. You're inside all the time, you work odd hours, by yourself, if you want, you pretend to eat Hot Pockets at your keyboard. And everyone expects you to be pasty and socially awkward anyway."

"He's made a fortune in stock options," Jean-François said enviously. "But he should have done a better job on Dead Space — really, it's scandalous if he had anything to do with it. Perhaps he should try to invent something useful, like color contacts that won't dissolve."

"If you followed our diet, you wouldn't need contacts," Carlisle said.

"So you've mentioned," Jean-François said, his tone unpromising, and Carlisle shook his head.

"How could Leonardo disappear?" I asked. "I mean, he was pretty famous in his lifetime, wasn't he?"

"Humans are easily fooled," Jean-François said airily. "An old man calling himself Leonardo moves to France from Italy at King François's invitation. He is accompanied by a handsome young Italian nobleman. A few years later, the old man dies. The young man inherits everything, returns to Italy and disappears from history. The old man's grave disappears when the churches are gutted in the Revolution. No DNA test will ever prove that Leonardo didn't die in 1519. Nor that he _did_."

A nugget of biographical information that I shouldn't write down on my art history final, I thought. It was rather a relief when Jean-François offered to show me around the house. I put my coat back on, and Carlisle and Alice followed Jean-François and me, leaving Em and Rosalie to play faro with Daniel. The place had passed through many families in its four centuries of existence, and walking through the rooms was like having a tour of interior decoration trends through the ages.

We ended up in a sunny gallery where Jean-François and Daniel kept the most important paintings – mostly Impressionists and later, Vuillard, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, even a Caillebotte still life of flowers that was almost abstract, artists I'd heard of but works that I'd never seen. These were the paintings that made rare appearances in exhibitions labeled only "Private collection," pictures that weren't on greeting cards in every gift shop in every museum. I was acutely aware of how privileged I was.

Jean-François left us in mid-tour when his cellphone vibrated; it was a client, he said, adding that Carlisle knew the paintings here almost as well as he did, so I was in good hands. Alice's face went blank a second, and she excused herself as well. But my father-in-law didn't continue showing me around. Instead he stopped, and guided me to an upholstered bench that sat in one of the window alcoves. We sat there for a few moments quietly, and I wondered what he wanted.

"I thought I should take an opportunity to talk with you while Edward is away," he finally started, and I tensed, because I realized that this was my opportunity too, to ask Carlisle about my tremors. "How are you feeling? You're very pale."

I couldn't help but snort. "Well, that's the pot calling the kettle white, isn't it?"

He smiled. "I mean, you're paler than when I saw you last. I think the others don't notice because they see you every day. And you look tired. … Is college too much? Are you getting enough sleep?"

"College is fine, and living with Edward, I probably get less sun than even in Forks. But I feel great. I haven't even gotten a cold."

"Living with Edward, you're not likely to get one. We're not disease vectors."

"And theoretically I'm not getting enough sleep," I said, knowing I didn't need to explain why. "But it's worth it. And I feel fine." I stared at the window opposite me for while before steeling myself enough to continue. "I do, however, I need to ask you something."

"Alice has herded everyone over to the stables so we have privacy, if that helps," Carlisle said. He added carefully, "Are you asking me as your father-in-law, or as a doctor?"

"As a doctor. I don't want Edward to know," I said, and stopped, feeling a sob invade my throat. I took a few seconds to compose myself before I continued shakily. "I don't want him to think it's his fault. Ever."

"I won't tell him anything you don't want me to, sweetheart," Carlisle said soothingly, running his hand along my back. "Tell me what is troubling you."

I recounted the episodes I had been having, and how they were assuaged by Edward's touch. "I thought at first they were panic attacks, but I don't think so anymore - I don't fear them, they're not debilitating, I just worry about Edward's reaction. I do not want him to freak out. He can't think again that I'm not strong enough to be with him. I am," I said fiercely. I bit savagely on my lip to stop my tears.

"Bella, shh," Carlisle said softly, pulling me into his hard arms, pressing my head against his gray sweater. "_Edward is not going to leave again_. It's impossible. He cannot."

I gulped in air to try to calm myself at hearing Carlisle say this aloud. "He would think it's his fault," I whispered.

Carlisle sighed. "It is his nature to feel responsible," he agreed. "But he will stay with you no matter what. And he knows you better now, he sees every day how strong you are. If what you have experienced had happened to any one of my other patients, I'd have diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder long ago and written a prescription. You're going to be okay."

Carlisle's face had been the very definition of compassionate as we talked. He'd doctored me before, of course, but for spills and sprains and things easily mended. Now I saw him as his oncology patients probably saw him, giving them strength for the next round of chemo, soothing their fears as they awaited the biopsy results.

His next words were not particularly soothing, though.

"There are two possible theories that I see immediately. You could really be having panic attacks – you haven't had any episodes here, away from Hanover, and the beginning of college with its attendant anxieties is a common time for them.

"But from what you've said, I don't think that's likely. So I have another theory, and it's actually why I wanted to talk with you without Edward. Will you indulge me?"

"Sure." My voice was muffled by the thick cashmere of his sweater, and I pulled away so I could see his face.

He gazed at me, not bothering to pretend to need to blink. "We have very intense relationships with our mates. I think you are beginning to become aware of this. It will always be powerful, Bella – what I feel for Esme, what Edward feels for you, cannot be described. Human couples have a period called limerence in the beginning of their relationships, a time of intense feeling, of first love, of compulsive desire, that usually fades in a few years. For a small minority of couples, it lasts for decades. Scientists call them 'swans.'" He paused for a moment to let me absorb that.

"For us, a much stronger form of it is a permanent state. For a human, to be the object of that devotion, to feel it even imperfectly … perhaps it is taking a toll on you. The irony, of course, is that my family's self-control – the thing that makes it possible for you and Edward to be together – would make this harder for you."

"What do you mean?"

"My line, which unfortunately makes me sound like a teacher in a sex ed class in Texas, is that abstinence makes the heart grow fonder. Jean-François and Daniel, even as bonded as they are, don't have the sort of connection that we have. Because we are restrained in hunting, we redirect our energies into our mates. That's a lot of energy to absorb, emotionally. "

"So you don't think there is something physical wrong with me?"

"Your scent is unchanged," Carlisle said matter-of-factly. "As Esme said, lavender, freesia, vampire."

"_What_?"

He just looked at me and waited. One beat, two beats, blush. I guess showers didn't entirely wash Edward away.

"With all this in mind, have you decided when you might become like us?" Carlisle asked softly. I started to speak, but he went on. "I know I said that your decision shouldn't be affected by the Volturi, but you might want to consider your own mental health, and Edward's."

"Edward's? Has he talked to you about - sorry, I know I shouldn't ask."

"It's all right. But _you_ should talk to him about this. You've been able to talk about other things, and that worked out, did it not?"

"Yeah," I said, flushing again as I recalled our discussion about my period last month. "And yeah, I have decided. But I want to tell Edward first."

"Of course. Whenever you're ready, we're ready for you," he said, giving me a smile that lighted up his whole face. Even though I was married to the most stunning man on the planet, it left me a little dazed.

"Okay," I said, shaking my head to clear it. "Um, so what should I do about my … love overdose?"

Carlisle laughed at that. "Maybe it's not an overdose," he said. "Maybe it's an addiction."

"Oh, you mean that I haven't had an episode this week because I spent most all of it with Edward?"

"Perhaps," he said, growing more serious. "But this is all purely speculative. I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to research this."

The memory of conference calls and rabbits flashed through my mind. "There won't be any animal testing this time, will there?" I asked.

"No, I'm not Dr. Doolittle, I'm afraid. And while you and Edward are unique, human-vampire relationships are not. I'm going to ask Tanya to visit you. I won't tell her the real reason, so she won't inadvertently alert Edward – she's never been as adept as the rest of us at hiding her thoughts from him –"

_Yeah, her seductive thoughts, _I thought with mounting dismay.

"— but she's the most likely of all of us to have some perspective on this. Is that okay?"

I nodded, even though the last thing I wanted was Tanya to join the boarding school graduates of Dartmouth in pursuing my husband. I gave Carlisle a hug. "Thank you for listening, Dad."

* * *

Carlisle was pointing out our hosts' Ricciardos through the centuries when Alice returned. The painter had anglicized his name and changed his style in keeping with the fashions of the times – I was particularly struck by a streetscape of New York from the '70s that was astonishing in its realism.

"Bella, are you hungry? Would you like to have lunch now?" she asked as she skipped in.

"Alice, why are you even asking me?" I said with a laugh, as Carlisle and I automatically walked toward her.

"I like to give you the _illusion_ of choice sometimes."

A place setting sat in solitary splendor on a round table in a corner of the dining room, a glass of red wine already poured. Daniel pushed open a concealed door in the paneling as I slipped off my coat again and we sat down. Behind him I could see a dark, narrow stairway, down to the basement kitchen, I presumed.

"I assumed that you would understand if I didn't cook," Daniel said, depositing a platter on the table and then sitting opposite me. "How I endured course after course at dinners when I was human, I'll never understand."

"This looks great," I said in thanks, helping myself to some incredibly thin slices of ham. It was all the sort of food that needed no preparation and would keep a long time – hard cheese, olives, cured meats – and since it was French, it was delicious. Unfortunately, as the only one eating at a table of four, I felt extremely self-conscious. So I asked Daniel how he had met Jean-François, and he politely obliged.

"It was 1867," he began, "and I had been invited for a dinner party at La Païva's ostentatious house on the Champs-Elysées." He paused at my blank expression, and explained, "She was a notorious courtesan of the time and she had found me interesting for professional reasons - I was a Goldschmidt and was about to marry one of my Rothschild cousins." I nodded as I chewed a piece of dry sausage, knowing at least that famous name.

"Everyone in Paris wanted to see the inside of her town house – she had commissioned a particularly atrocious Cabanel, for example," he said with distaste. "As was La Païva's wont, the party was made up of men, except for her. I don't remember any of them, except for one."

"Jean-François?"

"Yes. Jean-François had supplied her with some works and had charmed her, of course. There is a word in French, _médusé _- you know, you turn into stone by looking directly at Medusa? - that describes the effect he had on me." I knew that well. "When he signaled for me to leave, I did so without thinking or hesitation. As courtships go," he said wryly, "it was very short. And he did turn me into stone."

Alice's eyes widened in a rare instance of surprise, and then alarm, as Jean-François materialized behind Daniel. A second later Emmett loomed in the doorway. While the Cullens trusted their friends, they were engaging in a careful choreography to make sure the odds were always in my favor, I saw.

"Yes, if I had been able to control myself like your Edward we could have gotten our hands on a share of the Rothschild fortune," Jean-François said as he and Emmett joined us at table. "Unlike La Païva, I obviously didn't want Daniel for his money."

Daniel looked at him reprovingly. I guessed this was a discussion that they had had before. "It was fortunate timing because Caroline was able to marry one of my cousins without waiting for me to be declared dead," Daniel said. "She was able to have a much happier marriage with him than she would have had with me."

"And … you were happy with what happened?" I asked hesitantly, not sure if it was polite.

Daniel didn't mind. "Yes, once I settled down, because I was meant to be with Jean-François," he said. His mate touched one of his hands folded on the table. "Still, I missed my family more than most who have turned, I think.

"For obvious reasons, our family was very close-knit, and it was fortunate that Jean-François had a similar sense of family pride, because he understood my urge to help from afar. My family's money meant that they escaped much of the indignities that Jews suffered in that era, but even wealth wasn't a guarantee when the 1930s arrived. And while my diet is the very definition of trayf – "

"Non-kosher," Emmett the religious scholar put in for my benefit.

"- I still had that connection. That is why I am so grateful that your family helped my family."

"When?" I asked, confused.

"During the last war, of course. Don't you know?"

Daniel shot a look at Alice next to me. "I wasn't there," she said, and pointed at her brother. "Blame Emmett. Or Carlisle. Or Edward." Carlisle and Emmett both shrugged, looking almost embarrassed.

"They guided some of my old family and their friends out of Germany and France so they could get to ports and wait for passage to other countries – that is," Daniel added harshly, "when those other countries would deign to accept them."

His bitterness was heavy in the room, and I was too astonished to ask any of the questions roiling in my head – how, where, why? It was a forceful reminder of how little I knew my husband in some ways. He knew how to make me come apart at his touch, every detail of my childhood was locked in his memory, but what he was doing in 1942? I had no clue.

"It is a long story, Bella," Daniel went on. "Make Edward overcome his modesty and tell it to you."

"Absolutely," I promised.

"Indeed, they're heading back," Alice said, and like Daniel, without thinking or hesitation I pushed my chair back and stood up. I followed her through the French window to the terrace outside, not bothering to fetch my coat. Carlisle came to join us, and we watched our glinting blurs return, Alice grinning at something I could not yet see.

They were ... filthy, I saw in astonishment. Their pants were muddy, their shirts torn. Esme's hair was filled with dead leaves, and Edward had a streak of dirt across his cheek. They were beaming.

There was a resounding thunk as Esme's leap pushed Carlisle into the brick façade – Edward had once told me that Esme was always particularly "energetic" after a hunt - while Alice and Jasper embraced more sedately, and Edward hesitated. "I might make you dirty," he warned me.

"I hope you do," I murmured, and I vaguely heard laughs behind me from Daniel and Jean-François as Edward folded me into his cold arms. He smelled wonderfully of himself and yes, sex, and the musk of the forest.

All too soon I had to step back with a shiver, and Daniel asked, "What happened to you three?"

"We found a bear," Edward answered. I reached up to pull a pine needle from his hair. He looked extraordinarily sexy, even the smears of dirt highlighting the symmetry of his face.

"There are no bears in these woods," Jean-François said with perfectly French assurance.

"There are now," Edward said, smiling down at me.

"You didn't –" I asked, puzzled.

"No, the brown bear is endangered in France," he said. "We wouldn't take down the last bear in the forest."

By this time, Emmett and Rosalie had arrived to hear the story. "What happened was that Grace over here - " Edward nodded toward Jasper "- scented the bear and stopped short, _without thinking_. Esme and I both crashed into him and we all fell into the mud. We had to investigate the bear, of course, and we came upon a sow and two yearling cubs."

"And she was pissed," Emmett said happily.

"Extremely. She took some swipes at us, and we backed off. Emmett, yes, northeast, over the stream," he told his brother, and Emmett and Rosalie raced off.

"It looks as if some washing up and new clothes are in order," Daniel said, and Esme said, "Oh, please," with a laugh. Jean-François went off to take another call and Daniel led us inside to the broad staircase in the entrance hall before stopping at the first step.

He held up his hand and looked at me consideringly. "Wait for few minutes, and I'll set up a room for you," he told me. "No. 8 will be the warmest now." He then took the three hunters upstairs to find clothes, and I sadly watched Edward go.

I retrieved my knapsack from the small salon, having decided to call Renee from upstairs and see how Phil had fared in cooking their Thanksgiving dinner two days before. We had talked on her Thursday morning, but I'd spent most of the call answering Phil's questions about roasting times. At least there probably wouldn't be a kitchen fire this year.

In honor of the holiday, I too had had a bird for dinner. It was squab. Tasted like chicken.

Alice and Carlisle had stayed downstairs with me, and they flanked me as I climbed the stairs instead of sprinting up to their spouses as they undoubtedly would have preferred. The second floor was a long row of bedrooms, numbered as in a hotel, and Alice nudged me toward the door marked with an iron 8. I could hear water running as I stepped in and softly said, "Hey, sweetie."

"I'll be just a few moments," Edward called back.

Like all the rooms I'd seen in this house, this one was lovely, with all the charm that came from the sun pouring through French windows and gleaming parquet and an antique wardrobe and a curious version of a daybed, with a sofa back and sides but a full size mattress for sleeping … or whatever Jean-François and Daniel intended it for. An old porcelain stove painted with blue flowers provided more heat for the room – Daniel must have started a fire in it for me. The woodwork on the wall was a faded bluish-green that made me think of the eggs at the small farmers' market in Hanover, and the panels were painted with scenes from Aesop's fables, I decided, deciphering on one the fox disdainfully turning his back on a heavily laden grape arbor.

I dropped my knapsack on an upholstered bench and delved inside for my phone. My fingers encountered something unexpected and silky and I drew out a length of sheer blue fabric with a gold border. It was the material that Alice had bought when I went to Queens with her and Rosalie all those weeks ago. Hmmm. Alice Cullen, sex facilitator.

I saw an iPod and its player looking extraordinarily out of place on a chest of drawers with ormolu fittings, and looping the silk around my neck, I wandered over to turn it on. There was only one playlist, titled "Shag," and checking it out was irresistible: what would a centuries-old French vampire couple choose as songs for fucking? I had my finger poised to silence the music immediately if needed, but instead a woman's voice breathed out over a piano chord: _If I should die this very moment, I wouldn't fear/ for I've never known completeness like being here…_

The key to the wardrobe was in its lock, and I turned it open to see if there were electric blankets. I was out of luck there, only regular blankets and a couple of robes, but I got distracted by the mirror on the inside of the door. The blue silk suited me. I toed off my shoes and shucked my clothes quickly, then draped the fabric around my chest and torso as best as I could, tying the ends into a bow and wishing I had the skills of the Indian women who wear saris.

"Is this a present for me?" Edward purred suddenly behind me. "You definitely should have. And the wrapping is quite attractive as well."

I breathed in sharply as his bare chest pressed into my shoulder blades, his skin warmer than mine for the moment. Our eyes met in the mirror, darkening gold burning into brown, before he bent his face into the curve of my neck, his damp hair brushing my ear, his tongue on my skin. Bliss.

The piano chords of the song on the iPod had transitioned into a sensual beat_. "Wanna stay right here, till the end of time, till the earth stops turning/gonna love you until the seas run dry/ I've found the one I've waited for/ all I've known, all I've done, all I've felt, was leading to this…"_

Hands trailed down my shoulders and arms to my palms, fingers underneath intertwined with mine and lifted to caress my collarbones, then lowered to cover my breasts and tease my nipples. My breath came out in whimper as he and I watched the woman in the mirror writhe and arch, uncontrolled. The blood rushed into my cheeks; it was too much, and I tilted back my head and pressed it against his chest.

"Open your eyes," he whispered. "Look at yourself. Look at me. You're exquisite. I always want you." I forced my head back up and saw our hands descend farther, curving over my hipbones and pulling me back so I could feel his erection though the bath sheet tucked in around his waist.

The music changed, another woman's voice. "_Don't think about all those things you fear/ Just be glad to be here…" _

His right hand moved mine onto my sex, our fingers warm on my flesh beneath the silk. The tiny delay between what I felt and what I saw magnified the effect of his touch on me, and his arm wrapped around the front of my waist to hold me up as I swayed from the sensation of climax, my eyelids too heavy to stay open.

Edward held me against him as I regained strength in my legs, and our eyes met in the mirror. "Can I open my present now?" he asked, one side of his mouth curling up.

I smiled back at him. "You can open it anytime you want, you know that," I murmured. He started to guide me toward the odd bed, but the light hit his skin as we stepped away from the wardrobe, and I stopped. Here was a place we could both be in the sun.

"Let's go by the window," I suggested, pointing to the rectangles of light on the floor. A second or so later, the mattress and its duvet were on the parquet, and Edward beckoned me to him. I stepped into the sun, and the blue silk fell away under his hands, leaving me bare and flecked with reflected light.

"Exquisite," he said again.

"You aren't bad yourself," I said with a wink, then I yelped as he scooped me up and laid me down on the mattress. The sheets were old and soft.

"Arms over your head, baby," he said above me. I stretched up, and he wound my discarded wrapping around my arms, not tightly, but enough to make my chest bow up in an intriguing way.

"Can you free yourself if you need to?" he asked, and I hmmed. "Perfect," he went on, running a finger over my arched sternum. "But no cheating."

"_You're _cheating," I complained. "You still have a towel on."

"True, and you can't do anything about it." He cut off my protest by pressing his lips to mine, and I forgot for several moments what my complaint was. He moved down, and once safely away from my mouth, he opened his, running his tongue along my jaw and down my neck, the strong sun warming the trails of venom on my skin. He sucked at the swell of my breasts, and then my nipples, and my back arched more at my body's pleasure in this position and my arms pulled against the material trapping them.

"Behave," he stopped to warn, and I retaliated by using my toes to tug the bath sheet from his waist.

"Hah!" I gloated.

"Clever girl," he said in approbation, and returned to my breasts. Another woman's voice, a breathy one:

"_L'eau et le vin, je veux l'eau et le vin/ La terre et le venin …_"

After he was satisfied that he tortured me enough there, he moved down, the sight of his beautifully mussed head over my hips making my stomach curl deliciously. He hesitated above my sex, as he always did, looking for abrasions on my fragile skin. _I wish he didn't have to worry about that_, I thought.

He inhaled then and lowered his mouth to my clit, moving slowly at first, and I gasped and moaned at his tongue, and his fingers twisting with infinite care inside me, again and again.

"_I'm so glad to have you, and I'm getting worse/I'm so mad to love you, and your evil curse..."_

As he gripped my hips to hold me close to him, the air around us seemed to change, the sunlight thickening, each dust mote seeming to have triplets. Our playfulness dissipated, replaced by an urgent desire, his mouth moving hungrily on me. I came long and loud, not thinking of our sharp-eared neighbors, nor my climax bringing me release. I cheated and freed my arms, then I pulled impatiently at his to bring him on top of me. He pushed in without pausing, and I wrapped my legs around his waist in an effort to pull him nearer, able only to babble "yes, yes, yes" to his thrusts.

"_Vivo, mordiendo/ Voy, sintiendo el vacío …"_

The glints on his skin softened as the sun descended, but we kept moving together, Edward tireless, I unheeding of my exertions, both of us in a haze in which only the connection of our bodies mattered and satiation was impossible. I _was_ addicted to him, his skin searing on mine even though his borrowed heat was fading. The blue silk twisted around us, floating over my shoulders as I moved over him, wrapping around his erection, ripping in his hands as I put my mouth on him. When the last ray of sun left the window, a violent shiver swept my body, and Edward yanked his head up from my neck even as his hips continued to circle over me.

"I'm so sorry," he said, his expression horrified. He pulled the duvet over my torso, and I whimpered at the loss of his skin on me. "I'm sorry, and _I just don't want to stop."_

"I don't want you to," I breathed out, emphasizing my words with my hips.

He shook his head. "You don't understand. It's fucking Jasper, and I mean that in two senses of the word. _Get out_," he growled, and I finally got what he was saying.

A few seconds later I could hear Alice's laugh trailing away on the grounds below us, and the quality of the atmosphere lightened as she and Jasper and his empathetic circle of desire put distance between themselves and our bedroom. Edward sighed in relief and slid his hand in between us. "Come, love, and I can let you rest," he murmured hypnotically, and then his fingers again assured that I did. He slumped over me briefly in his own release before pulling away and arranging the bedspread around me completely. I shivered in my cocoon. He looked stricken.

"I'm going to move you over to the bed – it should be warmer there now," he said. I was too much of a boneless, exhausted mass to object as he carried me and the mattress to the other side of the room.

Edward found matches and lighted the candles in the sconces before coming to curl around me on the bed. I blinked sleepily at the play of light on the wall.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I think I should be asking you that," he replied. "Perhaps Aro was right. Perhaps he was just off on the timing."

"Huh," I said, after having had to search through my memory of our conversation about Aro's assumptions about our honeymoon before I understood him. "Do you think one can become a vampire through an excess of sex?"

"I wish that were true," he answered humorlessly. "Surely that's more pleasant than the usual way."

"Actually, I'm sort of surprised the Jasper Effect hasn't happened to us before," I said.

"He's generally been careful to stay away from us at crucial times, and it's helped that we've lived apart. But …." he added more slowly, stroking my hair, careful not to touch my skin, "you _have _experienced it before."

"I don't remember that."

"You wouldn't. It was the last night you stayed over with me before the wedding. You had a dream. I had to leave."

I _did_ recollect that night, and the memory erased some of my languor. It had been a very … inconclusive dream, one where I was repeatedly on the verge, and then Edward would be pulled away from me by interruptions of various kinds: Charlie in the hallway, Alice knocking at the door, even Mrs. Cope walking in as we inexplicably necked in the school office, his hand on the seam of my jeans. I had woken up hot and bothered and alone.

"I remember that dream," I said.

"Was it a good dream?" he asked hopefully.

"No," I answered. "It was frustrating, like our sex life at the time."

"Ah," he said. "I may not have had that dream, but I know the feeling very well…. What _is_ this music?"

The iPod was still playing. _"If I could sleep forever/ I could forget about everything …"_

"It's their 'Shag' playlist," I said, pulling my hands out of the duvet to make quotation marks.

"But almost all the songs are about biting and letting go and dying," Edward said.

"Maybe they mean _la petite mort_?" I suggested.

"Hmmm, a bilingual orgasm joke? You know, you have a more talented mouth than you give yourself credit for," he said, looking at my lips before pressing his to mine.

"Sooooo," I said significantly when we pulled apart. "I had an interesting conversation with Daniel while you were out. You didn't tell me the Cullens were Righteous Gentiles." Yes, I knew about "Schindler's List."

"That makes us sound more heroic than we were," he said, looking uncomfortable, then falling silent.

"How did it all come about?" I finally prompted him.

"You remember that I told you that we came over here for the first time in '39?" I nodded. "The war in Europe started shortly after we arrived, but we didn't want to have to return to the States so soon. And we realized we would have difficulties if we did, since, as you know, we have to avoid the draft. But then Daniel asked for our help."

He went on to describe the anti-Semitism they had seen in the States, and the even more virulent anti-Semitism they encountered in France, how so many of the art dealers Jean-François and Daniel knew, both in France and Germany, were Jewish and desperate to save their families. Daniel led the rescues, particularly at first, because this was the first time in Europe for all the Cullens except for Carlisle, and even for him, things had changed considerably in the decades he'd been away, busy with a family of newborns.

It was a way to help without attracting much notice – the people they rescued never knew their real names, and while they may have been instinctively wary of the Cullens, they never suspected their saviors' true nature. After all, it made sense to hike at night and hide from the authorities in the daytime, to travel across the countryside living off the land. The Cullens forged identity cards and ration coupons, stole cars and dazzled border guards. Rosalie and Carlisle, especially, pretended to be escapees' spouses, but Edward did sometimes as well, and I was a little jealous even so many decades later. They guided refugees over the Pyrenees into the care of Jewish aid groups in neutral Spain and Portugal, or less often, since the Swiss were known to reject or expel Jews fleeing the Reich, over the Alps into Switzerland. Daniel took particular satisfaction from leading the elderly grandchildren of his former fiancée to safety – and from draining Nazis.

"He said that he wanted to show them a Jew who truly was a bloodsucker before they died," Edward said, grimacing.

"As the war went on, our work became both easier and harder," he continued quietly. "It was easier because the Resistance became more organized, so there were more safe houses and routes in and out of France. But it was also harder, because more and more often we would go to a rendezvous point and nobody would be there – everyone had already been sent to the camps."

I could see that the memory of those missed meetings disturbed him. "But you still saved a lot of people," I noted.

"A tiny number compared with six million."

"You are an amazing man, Edward Cullen," I said firmly. I wished so much right then that I could have my arms around him. When I had teased him about sneaking across borders a few days ago, I had had no idea how right I was. "What was Jean-François doing while you were crossing mountains?"

"When the Germans invaded, Jean-François was well established as a dealer in that particular incarnation. He saw firsthand the extensive looting the Nazis were doing, thousands and thousands of works, and it infuriated him as a dealer and a Frenchman. He helped hide paintings the Nazis coveted. He cultivated people at the Jeu de Paume, where confiscated paintings were sent, and at the German office in Paris that oversaw the looting - it allowed him to feed information about shipments to the Resistance so saboteurs wouldn't blow up the trains carrying art to Germany. And he sold fakes to Reichsmarschall Goering, to finance our activities. When the war ended, he and Daniel disappeared from France for a while, and we … went back to high school."

"That must have been quite a transition for you."

"You have no idea," he said.

My conversations with Jean-François had left me with another question. "Jean-François and Daniel's collection must be worth a fortune, and this house, too … so why is Jean-François so obsessed with money?" I asked.

Edward grinned, and put his mouth almost directly on my ear. "He plays the ponies – badly," he whispered. "Perhaps if he could physically approach a racehorse, he'd be able to bet wisely, but he can't. It drives Daniel to distraction." He pulled away from me and frowned. "You're still cold, and we should bathe and dress. Everyone's returned by now and we do have a plane to catch."

"Oh, and I guess we've been pretty rude to Jean-François and Daniel," I said.

"Don't worry. They greatly enjoyed the Jasper Effect."

Indeed, when Edward and I finally made our way downstairs, Jean-François and Daniel looked extraordinarily content – I'd even say sleepy if that were possible.

"Alice and Jasper have been such an interesting addition to your family," Jean-François told Carlisle as we embraced and exchanged farewells on the steps, the lights from inside illuminating the night for me. "As I sure you will be too," he hastened to tell me, his eyes sparkling with mischief. "It has been such a pleasure telling you my old stories. And just think, I'll get to do it all over again someday!"

* * *

We said goodbye to Esme and Carlisle at Logan airport the next day with hugs and reminders that we'd see one another in just a few weeks for the winter break. My parents-in-law left for their connection to Seattle, and the rest of us made our way through the chill and dark to our cars for the journey to Hanover and the resumption of class the following day. Edward hadn't driven far on the 1-93 before Alice squealed in the back seat behind me.

"Jasper, great news - we're going to have a guest!" she burbled happily. "Tanya's coming for a visit!"

_Oh, yeah, great news._

* * *

_A/N:_

_Songs: "Gorecki," Lamb; "Hayling," FC Kahuna; "L'eau et le vin" (lyric: "I want water and wine, earth and venom"), Vanessa Paradis; "Blindfold," Morcheeba; "Olvido" ("I live, biting/ I go, feeling emptiness"), Capitan Melao; "Sleep," Dandy Warhols._

_I wondered what the Cullens did during WWII, since SMeyer didn't say. Having them smuggle Jews from Germany is a bit of wish fulfillment: there'd be many more members of the Price family around today if it weren't for Hitler. Jean-Fran_ç_ois is inspired a bit by Han van Meegeren, the Dutch forger who did sell fakes to Goering and was hailed as hero after the war. The Victorian art critic was John Ruskin (his poor wife eventually got an annullment). Leonardo da Vinci's young friend was Francesco Melzi, and the circumstances of Leonardo's death were as Jean-Franç__ois_ described them, which allowed me to have a little fun. 

_A wash sale occurs when you sell a stock then repurchase it shortly afterward. It screws up your taxes. _

_Jewish dietary law forbids blood consumption. _

_Thank you, Sugarbritches, for the recs on ADF!_

_My own recs: if you like ExB gallivanting around French museums, check out "Incunabula" by suitablyironicmoniker, in which they run around Eastern Europe and look for the earliest printed books, and "This Buried Life" by emmanuelle nathan, in which they cavort rather dirtily on the London Tube and at the British Museum. Both on my favorites list. _

_Art links on my profile page._

_Two chapters to go._


	15. Chapter 15: WRJ

_Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer will be making a mint off DVDs and downloads this week, not me._

* * *

Chapter 15: WRJ

We returned from Paris not relaxed and refreshed, but burdened by the diamond-sharp reminder that Aro's interest in me persisted. It meant that there was a tension that underlay even the lighter moments we shared, a tension that emphasized the rightness of my decision. The time was coming.

There was an air of tension on campus as well as the quarter wound down and big projects fell due and finals approached. And I still needed to fulfill the participation in experiments requirement for my psych class.

That's why the Thursday afternoon after our return found me leaving the psych lab with Lonnie, who'd picked up participation points for herself by accompanying me to a classroom where we filled out a questionnaire and watched some videos. Earlier that day, I had gone to yoga class and had some Jasper-aided meditation – a Jasper Effect that was safe for public consumption – and apparently it was a few too many hours away from Edward, for I had to escape to the lavatory in the middle of the questionnaire-filling and ride out an episode of tremors. The breathing techniques I had just practiced helped, but they had nothing on Edward's touch.

Edward's touch was tantalizingly close to me now: he was standing on the sidewalk looking at the college newspaper and ignoring the passers-by silently ogling him as Lonnie and I rounded the corner of the psych building. His skin was luminously pale under the steel-gray skies, the clouds promising heavy snow somewhere in the mountains.

"You guys never tan, do you?" Lonnie said. _No, no, no._

"You're one to talk, ice princess," I retorted, but immediately regretted it, seeing the flash of hurt cross her face. "Hmm, that didn't come out the way I wanted," I apologized. "You know, when I first met you at your dad's party, you made me think of a princess in a Russian fairy tale - pale, willowy, beautiful."

"Hardly," she muttered and hunched her shoulders, deflecting my compliment as I so often had deflected Edward's. It was surprisingly annoying to have my sincere observation dismissed like that.

Lonnie cleared her throat suddenly, and we both stopped as I saw the scene in front of us. Edward was no longer alone.

"I need to run, but I'll be happy to help you beat up that Kappa first if you need it," Lonnie whispered to me.

"Thanks, but I think I can take her out on my own," I whispered back. Compared with what was facing me this evening, that generically pretty blonde with the Greek letters on her butt was nothing … even if she was carrying on some blatant one-sided flirting, trying to move closer even as Edward shifted smoothly away from her. He grinned at my words that he shouldn't have been able to hear, and the girl took it as encouragement, lifting her hand to touch the sleeve of his pea coat, and finding herself thwarted by his subtle twist toward me.

"Ah, there's my wife," he said, his voice carrying easily, and I melted a bit: before our marriage I would have never have guessed how sexy it would be when Edward said _my wife_. He waved at me and Lonnie, who waved back before giving me a hug goodbye and heading to her house. Taking a deep breath, I started to walk toward my husband.

"Well, see you later then," Kappa Girl muttered before I got close enough that manners dictated that we be introduced, and turned on her heel.

I finally got my touch then, and the residual effects of my tremors faded as his lips brushed mine - if only briefly, for it was cool enough in late autumn here that his lips were too cold for comfort. I buried my face between the open lapels of his coat instead, breathing him in, his smell potent to me even through the hoodie that was part of his college student costume.

"Who was that?" I asked, tilting my face to him.

"She's in our art history class. She wanted to know if I needed a study partner for finals."

"Huh. I haven't noticed her there."

"_She_ certainly has noticed _you_. Which, I must say, turned her thoughts from mundane to reprehensible." He shrugged, dismissing the subject. "Take a look at this," he went on, handing me The Dartmouth, folded to an inside page. There, in a headline, was my name. My old name.

I looked back up at Edward. "Let's take a walk, shall we?" I said, narrowing my eyes at him. He nodded, seeming barely able to suppress a grin, as we took a right on Maynard Street.

He touched my hand for a moment as we walked, and frowned. "What happened to you today?" he asked.

I looked at him in alarm, wondering how he could have figured out that I'd had an episode, before I understood. "Oh, I got a scratch when I broke a pencil in my hand as I was doing the experiment," I said. "It was a very stressful questionnaire."

"What was it?"

"Well, I think I skewed the results," I said with a dramatic sigh. "It was a questionnaire about what qualities I wanted in my ideal mate. Do I want a night owl or an early bird? Must he be of the same ethnic background as me? Do I want someone who's intellectual or focused on his career? Do I want him to be younger or older than me? Do I want someone who is adventurous or conservative?

"The problem, of course, is that my ideal mate is a mutant who never sleeps, is simultaneously two years younger and 100 years older than me, a perpetual student who manages a million-dollar portfolio –"

Edward opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, then seemed to think better of it.

"- and who won't have sex before marriage but will fuck my brains out afterward."

He hissed and stopped abruptly, then pulled me against his chest. "If you keep that up, I'll be fucking your brains out against that wall over there," he growled in a whisper, nodding toward an old Queen Anne house ahead of us.

"It'd be too cold," I said sadly. He took a step back.

"True," he conceded, and zipped my jacket up a little more before we walked on a few more yards, until we were directly in front of the building that Edward had been imagining for our next encounter.

It was a cream four-story house with green trim, somewhat the worse for wear, that was being used as an administrative building. On the small front lawn stood a sign in freshly disturbed earth that bore an architectural rendering and a description:

_The future Swan House for Dance Studies_

_Thanks to a generous donation by the family of I.M. Swan, the Peabody Building will be renovated into a residential college for students interested in dance. E. Platt and Associates LLC of Seattle will design a dance studio to be built at the rear and will oversee Peabody's transformation into a structure certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. _

_While the decorative features of the 1893 building will be retained and restored, major structural changes will be made to provide efficient heating, cooling and ventilation. High-performance fiberglass windows will installed inside the existing wood sashes. Motion sensing lighting controls and energy-efficient fixtures throughout the building will help lower energy consumption. Composting toilets, which use microbial action to decompose waste, will reduce water consumption by thousands of gallons annually._

I shook my head at the idea of Esme having to think about composting toilets.

A small, fuzzy photograph of Grandma Swan accompanied the next paragraph even though none of the facts in it were hers.

_The residential college will honor the memory of I.M. Swan, 1932-2003, a philanthropist and patron of ballet from Phoenix. _

"So here is why I shouldn't tell anyone my maiden name," I said, a sour edge to my voice. "Because you had to bribe my way in with _this_." Kappa Girl might have dubious ethics, but she had no doubt been admitted to Dartmouth because she deserved to be here.

Edward seemed surprised by my bitterness. "Bella," he said, "we have to bribe the way in for _all _of us."

I looked at him dubiously. "But you had perfect SATs and brilliant essays."

"No elite college wants to admit five students from the same family who have no extracurriculars, questionable attendance records, a disregard for application deadlines and no diversity to offer."

I hadn't said so, but it had been hurt a little when he made those casual references to Ivy League donations. And because the donation was for all of us, it hadn't occurred to him that they were insulting. I exhaled, feeling a small weight lift from my shoulders.

"If they only knew what diversity you bring to campus," I murmured.

"I fervently hope they never do," he said. "When we started doing this, it was easy to get into college - in 1952, two-thirds of the applicants to Harvard were admitted. Today, though, there is a lot more competition, and Harvard turns away perfect SATs every year. Therefore, the 'generous donation' for all of us. We've done it a few times in the last decades."

"Couldn't you just make up stuff to get in?"

"If we have a choice between lying and paying money, we'll pay. Money is safer."

Good to know. "So do you have a namesake building?" I asked.

"Masen Hall for Women's Studies."

"Oh, it was chosen for you too! Is it the Whitlock Black Studies Building?" He said yes, and I asked, "What's Rosalie's?"

"She's a special case, as usual," Edward said. "She chose her own. She was so infuriated at Barnard in the '50's, because the women had curfews while the men across the street at Columbia could stay out as late as they wished, that she endowed a dormitory with the proviso that there would be no parietal rules – those, my obliviously post-feminist wife, are rules about when the opposite sex could visit and the like. Emmett has a McCarty Ursine Studies Lab, and Esme endowed a chair at the Yale architecture school."

"And Alice?"

"She hasn't had one yet, since she so recently discovered her name."

I looked up again at the future Swan House. I prayed that none of my classmates would ever associate it with me, but still … "It's going to be a nice building," I said finally.

"We thought you'd like to bring new life to something old … again," Edward said, his voice caressing my ear.

"I do like it," I said, pivoting back to him. "Bet you figured I'd be pissier about this."

He gazed down at me with perfect seriousness. "I would never use such a word in relation to you."

"More petulant, then."

"Not that word either. So you're not angry, annoyed, embarrassed?" he asked, giving me a look I couldn't decipher.

"No, I guess not," I said uncertainly.

"Okay, then." He gave me another too-brief kiss, and we turned back to head back to the car.

* * *

"Do I really have to go watch Tanya flirt with you all night?" I whined as we headed north out of Hanover. "I don't know if I can handle having to defend you from a sorority girl and a succubus on the same night."

"You don't have to worry about Tanya," Edward said, blithely ignoring the road to watch me. "Besides you might be more to her liking at the moment than I am … a beautiful warm human woman." I snorted at him, and he grinned. Obviously that was unlikely, considering how comfortable he was with the idea. I turned on the heat, and Edward directed the vent on his side onto his hands.

"We'll go home afterward for dinner?" I asked. "I have so much work to do." He nodded, and I added. "Oh, do we have any of those steaks left? Would you mind making one again?"

Last night, he had seared a farmers' market steak that was from some sort of super-virtuous grass-fed free-range cow that Edward told smelled much better (well, in a relative sense) than the steaks I used to get for Charlie and me at Thriftway. He'd followed the farmer's cooking instructions, which resulted in a steak that was rarer than I normally liked, but so delicious that even the blood that ran out when I cut into it didn't bother me. "Paris has improved your taste in food," Edward had said to tease me as I ate the last bite.

"We do have," he said to me now. "You know, cooking a steak doesn't demand much of my culinary skills."

"Keep at it, and maybe, just maybe, I'll let you try making pancakes again."

As we drove on, I contemplated catfights. Jacob would probably get off on two women fighting over him, it occurred to me. And Quil definitely would – at least, pre-imprint Quil.

"What are you mulling over there?" he asked, reaching over to run his warmed thumb on my cheekbone.

"Mmmm," I said, my eyelids closing in pleasure. "Um, I was thinking that you wouldn't get an ego boost from having two women brawling over you."

"Absolutely not," he said, appalled, and I opened my eyes in time to see a flash of embarrassment cross his face.

"Oh, it happened to you? Tell me," I demanded.

He grimaced then. "Only if you promise not to bring it up in front of Emmett for … say, 50 years."

I dutifully drew a cross over my heart. "Fine. But I'll probably forget it anyway, right?"

"I'm counting on it," he said. "It was when we were in high school in the Matanuska Valley, in Alaska, in 1980. Two 9th-grade girls had a disagreement over which one would approach me first." He gave me one of those creeptastic teeth-baring grins that would scare a sensible person. "The winner lost her nerve, though."

"Was it Sarah Palin?" I asked as a joke, thinking of the only human I had heard of from Alaska.

"No, it was _not _Sarah Palin," he said, adding with a new grin. "I wasn't her type."

"What? No, really?"

"The young Sarah Heath preferred Emmett, but Rosalie stopped her in her tracks. Sadly, I can't tease Emmett about it because he'll bring up the infamous Larsen-Johnston showdown."

Dusk was falling as we ascended the drive to Fenwick Castle, and lights came on in the library as Edward turned off the ignition.

An unearthly range of voices rang out from the house when I stepped out of the car, and Edward looked delighted.

"_Out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy/Out in the back seat of my '60 Chevy/Workin' on mysteries without any clues/Workin' on our night moves…"_

"I can't believe it," I muttered. Charlie loved this song; I didn't want to dwell on what memories it might have evoked for my father, especially since they probably involved Renee. "Hey!" I yelped as I was suddenly hoisted up so my legs wrapped around Edward's waist, warm hands supporting my bottom.

Edward's voice joined the chorus, the words breathed into my hair.

"_Tryin' to make some front page drive-in news/ Workin' on our night moves/ In the summertime …"_ he sang, twirling me around the gravel in front of the house. "_Workin' on our night moves /Tryin' to lose the awkward teenage blues …"_

"You too?" I tried to groan, but his face was emanating so much joy that I couldn't help smiling myself.

"You think I don't know the lyrics to every Bob Seger song from the mid-'70s?" he asked. "_That_ was an era when you heard every song on the radio ad nauseam. Well, not for us, but you know what I mean."

It was a song that would have been inflicted on him constantly and it would have never evoked memories. He had heard decades of love songs that would have just reminded him he was alone.

"I'm glad you feel like singing it now," I whispered, and he kissed my ear so that I shivered.

"Because of you."

"Enough of that for the moment," a sultry voice called from the front door, open now, silhouetting a breathtakingly lithe feminine figure. "Edward, Bella, we're all waiting for you."

"Tanya," Edward answered her warmly, carrying me to the sill of the door then letting me slide down so that he could greet his cousin.

Tanya embraced Edward enthusiastically and me delicately before pulling us in to the library, where the siblings had been singing an SATB version of "Night Moves" under her direction; Tanya naturally had a beautiful alto to join Alice's soprano and Jasper's baritone. In the light there I could see that she was wearing cowboy boots and a sleeveless minidress made pf such thin layers of material that it seemed translucent. She gracefully shook her red-gold curls out of her face and smiled at me.

"It's great to see you again," I said, trying to summon up some sincerity since she was here for me, even if she didn't know it – when he had called her from Logan, Carlisle had suggested to Tanya that she visit Hanover so she could work more easily with Alice in searching for the missing Denali cousin. "Have you had any luck finding Irina?"

"No, unfortunately," she said, still lightly holding on to my hand, her fingers cool. "But I have great faith in Alice's abilities. And it's a pleasure to see you and Edward - you both look wonderful."

Remembering Lonnie, I tried not to shuffle and demur, but my "thank you" was so unconvincing that Tanya told me, "No, you really do, even more so than at the wedding. We should chat, you and I, while I'm here, get a coffee, perhaps, as humans like to do?" I nodded an uneasy agreement.

Tanya was not as gorgeous as Rosalie, but she had an automatic manner of pleasing that was absent in my sister-in-law, who rarely bothered to turn on the charm. Tanya was the beautiful but approachable girl next door, Rosalie was the unattainable supermodel. Watching Tanya as she talked with the rest of the family, I realized with relief that she was treating Edward with the same degree of warmth she did Jasper and Emmett – for that matter, the same as she did Rosalie and Alice and me. If she was trying to lure Edward, it was with extraordinary subtlety. And I could see why the Cullens were so fond of her; even Rosalie looked as if she was having a good time.

It was while I was curled up next to Edward enduring the requisite family teasing over "my" building that a drunken memory came back and explained my husband's curious look earlier. Rosalie and Emmett were showing Tanya how I had tripped off Edward's feet after dancing with him at prom when I remembered the last time I'd stumbled like that, the night of the drinks party for the Russian majors. The night Edward had asked me to wait to find out why I should conceal my maiden name. The night I had tipsily threatened to tie him up and punish him for whatever it was he had done.

"Enough," I complained to Rosalie and Emmett. "I really think Tanya gets the idea. And _you _–" I cautiously poked a finger in Edward's hard chest, and lowered my voice despite the futility of it. "I remember now what I said. You _are_ going to get punished for this."

"Well," he said, with a return of his lazy smile. "I guess I'll just have to endure it."

_Hmmm, I'm going to have figure out how to do that. _

We spent much of the rest of the evening trying to come up with ways for Alice to see Irina. I found it surprisingly exhausting. What if Tanya went to Bratislava? Or St. Petersburg? What if Em decided to hunt bears in Kamchatka? ("What if I take Rosalie and we go to the hot springs in the Valley of the Glaciers?" he suggested. "That's much more interesting to focus on.") I was assigned the task of deciding to fly to Patagonia to search for Irina, and keeping my decision firm was difficult: I would start idly wondering why any vampire would subject herself to the Southern Hemisphere summer, for instance, and Alice's vision would waver.

"You and Edward are not going to find Irina on a detour to Isle Esme," Alice grumbled, and everyone except my husband snickered. Whatever she had seen, Edward didn't mind, based on how he was looking at me. I would have loved to have seen it too.

"Sorry," I muttered. "I never realized how mentally tiring this would be."

Our searches proved fruitless that night, and at the end Alice looked disappointed in herself, seeming only partly comforted by Jasper's murmurs and caresses. I recalled what Edward had said about the burden of Alice's gift, and I was ashamed that I'd been able to help so little.

* * *

The next day Edward and I returned home after our morning classes - he to change for a quick hunt with Jasper and Emmett, I to finish my final paper for remedial writing, both of us preparing for our weekend of concupiscence.

I was pouring myself a glass of water in the kitchen when he came in those worn jeans he favored for hunting, the ones that he looked so delectable in. He silently took the glass from my hands and put it on the counter. Then he pushed me gently against the cabinets, and pressed into me, making me feel small and protected under him, his face in my neck, his body taut as I ran my hands over his back, his reluctance to leave obvious. God, I didn't want him to leave either.

"I want to just _cover_ you sometimes, to hide you from the world," he said, his voice strained, "so it can't take you from me."

I felt that need so much myself that I didn't chide him for being overprotective. "We'll be hiding together all weekend," I said to remind me as well as him. "Go, and you'll be back sooner."

"Not soon enough … _For God's sake,_ give me a minute," he said irritably, then pulled back to look at me. "I'm being paged."

I smiled at him, and reached up to slide my fingers along his scalp. "What?" he asked.

"I was just thinking what a different meaning that has for you and for me," I said. "I mean, when I think of being paged I envision cell phones and you think of ..."

"Page boys."

"Really?"

"And the bell boy who would wander the hotel calling out your name because you had a telegram or a call at the front desk, where the sole telephone was," he said. He ran his nose along the side of my face and breathed in deeply. "Yes, I'm old. But I have a cell phone, and I know how to use it. Tell me where you will be. I'll miss you."

"Tell the guys hi for me," I murmured, and I immediately heard Emmett shout from the woods, "Hi to you too, Bella!"

"We have our own house, and still no privacy," I grumbled, and Edward released me so he could give me a final kiss on the nape of my neck.

_Soon, I will go hunting with you_, I thought while I watched from the other side of the sliding glass doors as Edward flashed into the forest, the dreary skies in keeping with my suddenly dreary mood. I then turned away to my laptop, "The Return of the Native," and a paper on Hardy's theme that it was no use trying to overcome destiny. Suck it up, Eustacia Vye.

As soon as I hit "save" for the last time on my document, I heard what sounded like a woodpecker rapping violently on the glass doors, and I looked up to see Alice, Rosalie and Tanya on the terrace. I thought about how it was too bad that one couldn't scold Alice for not calling first, since she always knew whether it truly was a bad time.

I unlocked the door. "The human isn't deaf," I told Alice as she hugged me. "Wow, you feel really cold."

"We've been loitering outside until you finished," she said. "It made Edward more willing to go, though I assured him you'd be fine."

"What? I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"No problem," Tanya put in. "We're just as comfortable chattering away in a tree as we would be inside at Fenwick." She was dressed much more appropriately for the weather today, in jeans and a long gray coat open over a soft, pinkish sweater that should have clashed with her hair but didn't.

"Alice and I aren't staying," Rosalie announced. "We're dropping off Tanya so you and she can discuss interspecies relationships and unnatural practices."

"Fuck you, too, grease monkey," Tanya said cheerfully, and Rosalie snickered. Tanya certainly had Rosalie wrapped around her little finger. "My plan, in fact," Tanya went on, "was to ask you, Bella, if you wanted that coffee, and you could show me what Esme's done here."

"Of course," I said. I figured there was no point in fighting _my_ destiny – it was time to talk to Tanya. Suck it up, Swan.

* * *

"Did Esme really choose these paintings?" Tanya said as she surveyed the gallery of food-themed art in the living room, the mix of fruit bowls and deer hunts.

"Yep."

"It's … interesting."

I looked at her with a knowing smile and waited for her to break. "Okay, okay, it's just plain bizarre. Esme can be a goof sometimes," Tanya conceded, and we both laughed before she grimaced as if she had just thought of something unpleasant.

"I support that you're aware that I offered to spend some time with Edward over the years," she said.

"It has crossed my mind a couple of times."

"I hope that doesn't bother you."

"A bit," I said, not quite honestly. Even with her exemplary behavior last night, it bothered me a lot, and I felt stupidly unsophisticated because of it.

"You should know that I wouldn't come between a vampire and her mate - I wouldn't have survived a thousand years if I did," Tanya said gravely. "Nor would I interfere with a truly bonded human couple."

I nodded, though I wasn't sure where I fit in that dichotomy, and Tanya seemed to sense my uncertainty.

"Edward was meant to wait for you, though we didn't know it at the time," she said, and looked at me in assessment. "You didn't believe me last night, but you truly do look even more lovely now than at your wedding."

"I bet you say that to all the girls," I muttered. She raised an elegant eyebrow at me, and I flushed. "Thank you. It's nice to hear that from someone other than Edward."

"He's utterly sincere."

"I know. Well, about 95 percent of the time, I know." I took a deep breath and finally decided to rip the band-aid off. "Speaking of interspecies relationships -" I started without any finesse at all.

"I am absolutely looking forward to this conversation," Tanya said with a delighted smile.

"It may not be quite what you expect," I warned her. "Have your partners ever suffered any, um, adverse effects when you were with them?"

She sobered instantly. "Edward must have told you that I was rather a praying mantis in my early days," she said with some discomfort.

I stared at her. "You have completely lost me," I said.

"You know, praying mantis females bite off their mate's head during copulation -"

"No!" I said, dumbfounded. I'd somehow missed the day in bio when Banner discussed insect sexuality. "Edward wouldn't say … something like that. And that's not what I meant. I mean, did they have like, withdrawal symptoms when they were away from you? Tremors? The shakes?"

"Hmmm." She paused for a second, apparently to take an inventory of her mental files, then shook her head. "No. In fact, when I didn't kill them," she said ruefully, "they left me in better shape than when they met me. Good sex has a lot of benefits. Does your question mean that _you_ are having some effects?"

I heaved a big sigh to release some of my disappointment that her experiences seemed unlikely to help me. "Yes, I get the shakes, I think when I spend too much time away from Edward. They go away when I touch him. Like I'm getting my fix."

Tanya gazed at the Bonnard breakfast table for a moment. "I've always liked that one better than the Met's," she murmured, running through her files once more, then shook her head again. "No, it hasn't happened. But there are crucial differences between my relationships and yours. Mine are necessarily short, and none of my partners was my mate."

"But you do all the usual … stuff with them?"

"Mostly – but you know about the kissing restriction." I nodded. "No anal sex, of course, so I pretend to find it disgusting, and then my partners are pleasantly surprised when I do it to them..." she trailed off. I'm pretty sure I looked thunderstruck. "My muscles are too strong for it to be comfortable," she explained.

"Oh," I said faintly.

"I had to work out some alternative techniques for fellatio –" she flashed her teeth a second "- and I don't swallow."

"Why?" I managed to get out.

"Human ejaculate, human food intake, both foul. Vampires taste much better," she said casually.

Just how mortifying would it be to have to suggest to Carlisle that swallowing was the problem? Thank heavens that couldn't be the case.

"And I've had unfortunate experiences tying my partners up," Tanya went on. "If they struggle … it makes them too reminiscent of prey."

My face burned remembering a length of blue silk in France. Tanya didn't need to know about that. "But you … would let them do it to you?" I asked instead.

"Sure, not that anything can really restrain me."

Perhaps her experiences could be useful after all. "Maybe you can help me with something?" I said. "I could use your advice… um, discreet advice."

"Of course," she said, looking pleased. "No Emmett, I promise."

I believed her.

After that, I was able to relax considerably. Besides, she was one of the two people in the world I could have this conversation with, who had actually experienced what it was like to make love to someone of a substantially different temperature.

I was still reticent on my end - after all, Tanya could generalize about hundreds, thousands? of lovers, while my lack of experience meant that I couldn't say much without impinging on Edward's desire for privacy – but I was eager to ask questions. And she seemed perfectly comfortable answering them, telling me about a few of her long-gone lovers … Slovakian peasants, Danish astronomers, Italian sculptors, French philosophes, students at the world's gloomiest universities. Sometimes she was a muse, sometimes a model ("I've been Galatea three times," she said, rolling her eyes. "Such a silly male fantasy"), sometimes a patroness.

"I flirted with Voltaire," she recalled as I showed her the bedroom, "but he was too attached to Mme du Châtelet at the time … oh, nice bed! Esme's work?"

"Like everything here," I said, pointing at the strategically placed vanity mirror.

"Mmmm, convenient," Tanya said with a nod before turning back to our bed. "Have you thought about a waterbed? It would have a heater."

"No," I murmured, distracted by the thought of warm water undulating under Edward and me as we moved together.

"You have to be careful, though, because when you puncture the mattress - and I have - it's rather messy. But perhaps it would work for you two; you seem to take good care of your furniture," she said, running her hand along the unblemished wood of our headboard, her underlying meaning completely obvious.

"Um, that's new," I muttered. While the damage was nothing compared to what we had wreaked on Isle Esme, we had decided to get a replacement for our battered bed frame, and it had arrived just that morning.

"Well, then, maybe you don't," she said slyly, and I gave her a dirty look that made her laugh.

"Do you ever fall in love with your lovers?" I blurted out when she poked her head in the bathroom to check out the hot tub.

"No, I've never been in love," she said, shrugging. "And unfortunately, men get so _clingy_. You teach one how to make you come, and he won't want to let you go. You wouldn't believe how eager some of them are to marry."

"Oh, yes, I would," I said dryly. "So … is Edward the only unattached man to have resisted you?"

"No," she answered with nonchalance. "I've misjudged sometimes. But I never push, and I've never stolen a man who didn't want to be stolen. Besides, there's always someone else."

But there's only one Edward, I didn't say.

* * *

I sent Edward a text to let him know I was heading to town with Tanya, to run an errand and maybe even get the coffee that she had mentioned. She also wanted to see Swan House ("Cute!" she declared) and take a look at what else had been built ("Ugh, they look like retirement homes," she said of the newer dorms) since she'd last been on the campus.

Meaning, in 1965. Before Dartmouth went co-ed. I could only imagine the effect she must have had on the student body back then.

As we walked south on Main to the coffee shop, Lonnie turned the corner of Choate Street with Max, my I-hoped-would-remain-undeclared admirer from psych class, just in front of us. Despite his name, he was tall and muscular, with bright blue eyes and blond hair that was shorn short for daily swim practices. In the too-few seconds before we got into talking proximity, all I could think was, "Max isn't going to know what hit him."

At least Tanya should give him plenty to fantasize about instead of me for the rest of the quarter.

"Hey, Bella, we're just on our way to Dirt Cowboy for coffee," Max greeted me first, making white puffs of air as he spoke. He froze a moment as he took in my companion. "Hi, uh, uh…," he stammered.

Tanya acknowledged him with a smile, and I too froze. Holy crap. Tanya looked exactly as breathtaking as she did 30 seconds ago, but it was as if a switch marked "Seduce" had been flipped on. She was exuding sex even more palpably than Jasper did when he was in the mood. Despite her reassurances earlier, I couldn't help wondering again, _How in hell had Edward ever resisted her? _

"Um, hi, guys, this is Edward's cousin, Tanya," I mumbled, realizing that I had no idea what Tanya used as a last name, or if she had even been born with one. "My friends Lonnie Yefimov and Max Pearlstine."

"Tatyana Aleksandrevna Aleksandrova," Tanya elaborated.

"Svetlana Evgenevna Yefimova," Lonnie purred, and my eyes widened. She was standing taller than I'd ever seen her, and she was … stunning. She really looked like a Svetlana.

"Krasivaya!" Tanya purred back and the two of them pursued a conversation in Russian as Max and I stared, transfixed by their obvious mutual attraction. After a few minutes, Lonnie turned to me and said, with a most uncharacteristic wink, "Bella, do you mind if I borrow Tanya for a bit? I'd love to show her the copy of Custine's memoirs that Edward gave my father."

"Uh," I said, stalling, and Tanya frowned at me. "Sure," I answered helplessly, trying to control a feeling of panic. "Um, Tanya, do you want to meet me somewhere so I can take you back to the house?"

"Oh, I can drive her," Lonnie volunteered, and pulled at Tanya's hand.

"Bella, I'll see you later," Tanya said, "and Max, it was a pleasure to meet you." He nodded at her, seemingly unable to speak, and she and Lonnie started heading back along Choate. Oh, no.

"Wait, Lonnie has a dog at her house," I said frantically, remembering Vlad the borzoi, and human and vampire turned around to look at me curiously. "Because, uh, Tanya, aren't you allergic?"

"Indeed, I can be," Tanya said agreeably. "Svetlana, would you put the dog out?"

"Anything," Lonnie murmured.

Tanya stepped to me and leaned into my ear as if she was about to kiss my cheek in farewell, but instead she murmured so softly that it would have been impossible for other humans to hear, "Thank you, but I would have realized."

"Oh," I croaked.

"And," she went on, "the way Lonnie looks right now? That's how you are when you're staring at Edward. Krasivaya. Beautiful."

* * *

"Yes, dear," Alice answered, even before the first ring was completed. I had blindly followed Max to the coffee shop catercorner from the Green, able only to worry about Lonnie. When we arrived I had recovered enough to send Max ahead and have him order for me, giving me a chance to duck into an alley and call Alice out of sight of the shop's plate glass windows.

"Rose and I are at that terrific store in White River Junction that repurposes clothes," Alice said now. "Do you like Edward better in green or purple?"

"Green," I said distractedly. "Listen -"

"No, purple," Alice decided. "Don't worry, Lonnie will be fine. Tanya hasn't misbehaved in a while."

Never knowing what "a while" meant to someone in the context of eternity, I asked, "When?"

"Seventeen oh two is the last one I know about." Her carefully couched answer did nothing to assuage my fears.

"Christ," I hissed. "And even if she leaves Lonnie physically intact, Tanya's still going to break her heart!"

"Mmm, well, yes, probably," Alice said dismissively, "but Tanya's had plenty of practice in how to let her lovers down easy. Couples break up. It's part of life for humans. You live, you learn. Blah. Blah. Blah. This will be the best thing that's ever happened to Lonnie. Really. I don't even need to look. I know these things."

"You're not as psychically informative as I'd like," I grumbled.

"You are in no position to give me lectures, Miss Suffer in Silence," she said tartly. "Why didn't you tell anyone?"

Crap, of course she'd seen all that once I'd decided to talk to Tanya. "I told Carlisle," I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. "You know, the doctor in the family?"

"Damn, I should have eavesdropped on that conversation," Alice said. "No matter. It's time for you to tell Edward that something is going on with you."

"I will," I said in promise, and apparently I was going to keep it, because Alice said, "Yes, you will," before hanging up.

Maybe Lonnie wouldn't decide that she wanted to try being tied up, I thought glumly as I entered Dirt and bypassed the display cases, figuring that the scones and cookies inside would do nothing for my queasiness. I was finally getting an understanding of Jacob's fears about my being with vampires, even a vegetarian ones - and I didn't even have the excuse of being born with some mutant genetic imperative that made them archenemies.

I joined Max at a wooden table along a brick wall in the back, setting down my knapsack on an empty chair before taking up the tea that he had gotten for me. "Your family is really filled with lookers," Max observed when we had had our fill of speculation about what would be on our final. "Rosalie Cullen is your sister-in-law, isn't she?" I nodded. "She's in my organic chem class. She is unbelievably smart, too, and so fast on the clicker. She seems really shy, though."

My drink slipped in my hand at that. "She is very reserved," I said after I wiped liquid off my shirt. "Um, I didn't know that about Lonnie," I added vaguely, but Max didn't hesitate.

"She's a Lug."

"What?"

"Lesbian until graduation," he said airily, going on to describe a cousin who had girlfriends at Swarthmore, where it was the thing to do, and boyfriends afterward, and I disliked him for it. If Lonnie fell in love with Tanya, it wouldn't be because she was following some fashion.

So when Max suddenly blanched under his Thanksgiving-in-Antigua tan, I smiled a bit maliciously at him. And I didn't jolt in surprise when a low murmur brushed my ear.

"Did you miss me?"

"Not at all," I lied, even as I leaned into Edward's coat in relief and breathed in him and the woods for a moment. He placed a kiss on the top of my head, his lips cold on my scalp.

"Edward, do you know Max Pearlstine from my psych class? Max, my husband, Edward." Edward straightened up then, and shifted a cup of coffee to his left hand before extending his right to Max. Even though he had made this concession to human sensation, he still looked to be in intimidating-vampire mode, and Max stood and took his hand with obvious reluctance. He may have been taller than Edward, but he shrank under my husband's glare.

"Um, hi," he said with a lot less enthusiasm than he had to Tanya, and he made a show of looking at his cell phone clock before hurriedly adding, "I should go back to work now, especially since I don't have my study partner any more. Bella, would you like sometime to -" He stopped short, reconsidered, and said, "Well, see you later, Bella, uh, Edward."

He threw on his parka and hastened away, and Edward occupied the chair Max vacated. He reached across the table to put his hands on mine, one warm, one cold.

"You weren't particularly friendly just now," I observed.

"I had no interest in chatting with the boy, or in seeing Tanya in his head."

"Oh, yes, _your_ cousin has snared Lonnie." I told him the story of their encounter, and even with Alice's lack of concern, I still had to ask. "Is Lonnie going to be okay?"

"If we didn't think Tanya was completelly trustworthy, do you think you would have spent the afternoon alone wiith her?" he asked in turn. It was so obviously a rhetorical question I didn't bother to respond. He hesitated a moment. "Lonnie has had some encounters with boys that didn't go well," he finally said, and I thought about how she had flinched when I had jokingly called her an ice princess. "When she watched us kissing in her kitchen she was wondering if she would ever feel that way about someone. Tanya may be just what she needs."

I looked at him curiously, and couldn't help asking, though I knew the answer, "And you're really okay with that, Mr. Turn of the Last Century?"

"I always have passing worries about exposure, but as I've said, I'm not in a position to judge what other consenting adults do. Not –" his post-hunt-gold eyes had darkened and he leaned forward so he could murmur in my ear "— when I picture licking lion's blood off your skin and taking you in the woods ..."

Oh, fuck me. This was so not the place to have this conversation. "I know I'll like that," I whispered shakily.

"Has the weekend started yet, baby?"

I nodded. "Let's go home."

As we left, in the back of my mind I was thinking two things - the Cullens doubtless found their own version of food sex pretty damn appealing, and the prospect of Edward painting me with blood didn't bother me. At all.

* * *

Edward got me sweaty in the sauna with an avidity that soothed any fears I might have had about how my body tasted, his tongue chasing droplets on my breasts as if they really were lion's blood, and then got me wet in the shower with an equally avid deliriousness. We moved on to the electric blankets and made love with a continued intensity that demonstrated just how much he needed – we needed – this weekend. Edward had said that we didn't have a deadline for lovemaking, but sometimes we still couldn't believe it.

Although I could feel his urgency as though it were my own, I couldn't keep up with him. "Sorry, sweetie, I have to take a break," I panted as we were coming down, temporarily wiped out even though we were side by side, in a position that didn't require much exertion from me.

"Of course," he said into my shoulder behind me, but he groaned as he pulled out, still hard, and I groaned too.

When I returned from the bathroom, I smiled to see that he had moved into the wet spot, and was thoroughly covered. He definitely didn't want to lose any heat.

I slid under the covers next to him, and as always luxuriated in the feel of his heated flesh skimming along mine, at being able to glide my foot down his leg without shivering.

"Soooo," I started, "I have a question for you."

He snorted into my hair. "Truly? How unusual."

"Fine," I huffed, and fell silent, knowing it would drive him mad.

"Bella," he said a few seconds later, "please ask me."

And so I posed the question that had nagged me ever since I had learned of her existence, glad that I was able to ask why he chose me – ordinary me when he had turned down a gorgeous succubus – somewhat more out of curiosity than insecurity. Thank you, Tanya.

"If you hadn't been able to read her thoughts, do you think you would have gotten together with Tanya?" I asked quietly. "And having seen her in action … I don't know how you could have said no to her. She's irresistible."

He looked down at me contemplatively. "Is this a question that you've had a long time?"

I gave him a small nod.

"I'm sorry I teased you," he said, pressing me closer. "Before I answer your question, I want to say that as much as your silence is a balm to me, there is still no one whose thoughts I would more like to know. You know when I met you I hoped that proximity would allow me to dismiss you, would dissipate my obsession with you ... but all I found were words and kindnesses that made me want you more. And I know now that your mind would have simply reflected how you acted. You weren't pretending not to be afraid of me, because we've been in too many situations in which you were frightened and trying to hide it, and I know what that looks like."

"I have some really uncharitable thoughts sometimes," I felt compelled to say.

"As do I. But since you can't lie well, I know you're not a hypocrite. And had I been able to see you imagining us together ..." He shifted a little and murmured, "Bella, am I right in assuming that you imagined us together sometimes?"

"Why do you need to even ask?" I said with a laugh, and pulled down the blanket a bit so I could kiss the center of his chest.

"I can't imagine anything that would have been more alluring had I seen that," he said, then frowned. "And troubling - would we have been able to wait? Would I have been able to control myself sufficiently? Looking back, I don't think I could have, yet I might have been arrogant enough to believe that I could. I may have needed to know the feeling of you being ... gone forever to have approached making love with you with sufficient caution. Which is not meant to be a justification, just an observation."

"A valid one," I agreed, and I felt some tension in his skin ease. "The important thing is that you can now," I reminded him yet again. "So - what about Tanya?"

"My unshakable attachment to my moral code made me resist her," he said pompously before his angelic look dissolved into a smirk.

"Okay, smartass. But what do you really think?"

"We know that I'm not immune to lust, so you shouldn't be too judgmental of a young man of 50 ... or 60 ... or 70 ..."

"My God, that often?"

"When the families would get together, yes, but she didn't push," he said, echoing Tanya's own words. "And sometimes she was in a relationship and even in her thoughts she'd be otherwise engaged. …The mind-reading played a big role, certainly. But there was more than that. I just couldn't see Tanya as a romantic partner. Every time she approached me, it's as if I watched the encounter as a neutral narrator – she's beautiful, charming, she shares my interests, she's an excellent Russian tutor … yet I was completely disengaged. I think that I was waiting for you, even if I didn't know it."

"You are an incurable romantic, sir," I told him.

"You don't believe me?"

"Yes, I do. " I looked at him seriously, and pulled away to climb out of bed. "I believe you completely."

"So where are you going?" he asked as I stood up.

"I'm putting something on so I won't get cold."

"That seems unnecessary, because it's quite warm right here," he said, patting the electric blanket over his hips. I ignored him and went over to my dresser, grabbing one of the pieces I'd purchased in Paris from my lingerie drawer. It was a knee-length white cotton-lawn gown, sleeveless, laced up the front with a delicate silk ribbon. With its old-fashioned design, it would have been quite innocent if it weren't so sheer.

I slipped it on, earning myself an appreciative noise from Edward. "You just stay right there," I told him, then went to the entry to retrieve a shopping bag from my backpack.

Edward had obediently stayed in place while I was gone, and his eyes widened when I reappeared with the bag.

"Another present for me?" he asked.

"No, for me," I drawled, pulling out the ropes that Tanya had helped me get cut to the proper sizes at the hardware store in town. They were made of soft white cotton - Tanya had pointed out that barbed wire wouldn't harm Edward, but the idea was too disturbing. As it was, I wasn't sure how Edward was going to react to this. I wasn't sure how _I _was going to react.

Edward watched the process with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. "What are you planning to do with those pieces of thread?" he asked.

"Keeping my word. I don't want you to accuse me of making empty threats and hollow promises. Hands above your head."

His hands were nestled now against the headboard, but he was grinning, evidently at the idea that he could be bound. "I suppose that it's no use my pointing out the obvious ….?" he asked.

"No."

My first impulse as I looped a length of rope around an opening in the bottom frame that Tanya had pointed out was to giggle - Edward was right, the thought he could be restrained was ridiculous, as was the possibility I could be some sort of dominatrix, and I was sure I didn't have at all the properly serious mindset for this - but my embarrassment died in my throat as I saw how his face relaxed watching me. I wondered why.

_Right over left, left over right_, went the knots, _neat and tight_, between his wrists and around the opening in the frame on the other side of the bed. "Where did you learn all this?" he asked as I worked.

"Tanya," I said, looking up to see his reaction.

"Good. I was afraid it might be Rosalie." _Interesting,_ I thought, reminded of chains again.

"I've always liked that chemise," he said softly as I climbed back on the mattress.

"I've never worn this before," I said, puzzled. "It's still in one piece."

"Alice showed it to me, that morning before you went shopping, remember?"

_That _bit of privacy invasion I definitely remembered. "In that case…" I said. I pulled out the ribbon in the gown and tied it around his wrists next to the ropes. "You can wear it too."

"Alice didn't show me that," he murmured when I sat back on my heels next to him, his eyes flickering to my chest. I looked down to find my gown gaping nearly to my navel. Useful.

"I see the part where you tie me up," Edward went on. "So where's my punishment?"

"It's nothing, really," I said, pulling down the blanket and checking his skin with my hand. Good, I'd be okay with this. "It's just that you," I kissed his neck. "Can't." Sternum. "Touch." A nipple. "Me." An inch below his navel. "Because, you may not have noticed, you're _tied up_."

"I'm not sure that's a punishment," he muttered so quietly that I almost didn't hear him, and I looked at him curiously.

"I wouldn't have imagined my control-freak husband as the submissive type," I teased him.

"No, it's just … I don't have to think as much." And I finally got it. The ropes absolved him of the responsibility of worrying about how to touch me safely.

I moved back up his body so we were face to face. "Don't think at all right now. Just feel," I whispered, and kissed his mouth safely, opening mine only when my lips wandered down to his jaw and below, tasting him with my tongue. Nothing could taste as good to me as his skin.

Normally, Edward was … attentive to my breasts, but I saw that in this situation that I'd have to take their stimulation into my own hands. Hmmm, maybe not, I thought. I scooted up again until the gap in my gown was over his face.

"Is this okay?" I said, shifting so a nipple moved across the seam of his lips, then pulling back.

"Come back here," he mumbled, and I took it as a yes. I dipped down again, and we spent some time pleasurably repeating the action until his tongue darted out and ran a swift circle around a nipple, and again.

"Closer," he breathed, but I pulled away, not understanding, and he went on, "Let me taste you. Let me make you wet."

_Oh, oh, oh._ I sat up and crossed my arms to take off the gown, but Edward stopped me. "No. I really do like that chemise," he said.

"It will get in the way," I objected.

"It will concentrate your scent."

One couldn't argue with a vampire on that. I shuffled into position, and lowered myself hesitantly, grabbing the headboard with my hands for support since Edward couldn't hold my hips.

"Closer," his voice said from under the gown.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. You won't smother me, you know. More."

"You are awfully bossy for a submissive, though I guess — " I couldn't finish, because his tongue darted out again, moving insistently on my clit and staying there until my moans became a scream. Panting, I pushed back from the headboard so I wouldn't collapse on his face, and slumped onto his chest for a moment.

"Your turn," I said woozily, and he laughed.

"I think that _was_ my turn," he said.

"No," I said, and I slid down so that his cock moved between my breasts, and he bucked slightly.

"Easy, baby," I warned, and did it again, this time pushing his hips into the mattress as hard as I could in a reminder. How had I managed never to have done that before?

I shifted slightly so I could run a hard nipple along his harder length. Divine. How had I managed never to have done _that _before? Again. My breathing quickened as he twitched under me each time I made a pass, over the tip and around the ridge. I contemplated just doing this repeatedly until he was too cold to touch.

His roughened voice pulled me out of my haze. "Bella, stop," he pleaded. I pulled myself off him as quickly as I could, and sat back on my heels. "I'm going to lose control," he said.

"Lose control in what sort of way?" I asked, surprised, because I hadn't even had my mouth on him yet.

"Um, in an embarrassing way."

I felt a great surge of pride. "If I did that would you consider it embarrassing?"

"No," he admitted.

"Then don't be such a guy. And let me have my ego boost." I gave him a wide grin before I ducked back down to play with him some more.

But the pause had allowed Edward to retrieve some of his restraint, and so I replaced my nipples with my tongue, removing my taste from his skin before taking him into my mouth as his moans became frantic. I released him with a groan and slid up his wet length until I could lower myself around him.

There was no other sensation that compared to that.

Our breaths left us in soft grunts, and I bent my torso down to his so I could support myself on one hand and plunge the other into his hair, the position making my insides coil. As I rocked above him, I started to feel as if I was disintegrating again, as I had in Paris.

"Sorry, baby, please," I whimpered, "I need you to hold me."

A simple twist of his wrists made the wood of the bed frame splinter and the ropes fray, and then his hands were on my arms, pressing them into my sides, floating me above him. "Tighter, please," I asked, and he held me tighter until I dissolved and so did he.

Much later, he found the snapped ribbon of my chemise, and smiling slyly, tied it around my wrist before I could even blink. Control freak.

* * *

"Sooooo -" I said again, when I had once more curled up against Edward under the blanket.

"Another question, Mrs. Cullen? You are full of them tonight," Edward said. His fingers made arabesques on my back.

"No, this time I have an announcement to make," I said, and regretted the note of uncertainty in my voice.

He heard it, of course. "And it's something you're not sure that I'll like. Is that why you are doing it here?" he asked warily, his hand stilling, and he propped himself up on his elbow. "Do you think this puts me in a better mood?"

"Oh, I'm pretty sure it does," I said, and he chuckled.

"Fine. That was a silly question."

"But your first question wasn't. This," I made a circle with my hand above our bodies, "is an important part of who we are, what we do - what we can do together, even with its many limitations. After all, I said yes to you in bed ... or on the bed ..." I stopped to laugh at a memory. "It made for some difficulty for me when Jessica asked the details of your proposal."

"How did I miss that?"

"It was that sunny day when you went hunting and I went to school for the distribution and signing of the yearbooks - you know, the ones you and Alice aren't in. Do you usually even buy the yearbook?"

"Of course not. But I thought it would be amusing to make my classmates at this particular high school squirm coming up with something to write in mine," he said. It was true – all the inscriptions for Alice and Edward that I had collected were awkward renditions of "Best of luck to a memorable classmate." Jessica had decorated her name with a little heart on the i.

"Anyway," I said, "I think Jessica thought I'd be more forthcoming about your proposal if you weren't around."

"So what did you say?"

"Well, I couldn't tell her that you had asked me to marry you as a condition of my becoming a vampire, nor that I had said yes _on your bed_ because I was so desperate to get into your chastity-belted pants …" He rolled his eyes at me. "So I told her that you asked me at the Forks Diner, over macaroni and cheese."

"That's disgusting!" He looked hilariously repulsed.

"Yeah, the mac and cheese there is pretty bad."

"No, I mean ..." he paused, so revolted that it took a second for my joke to sink in. "In truth, that was a good thing to tell her - if something that I _never, ever _would have contemplated doing. Even as a human. It also explains why she was wondering why there was no macaroni and cheese at the wedding."

"Really? Then I guess that by her lights, we should have served mushroom ravioli in a sauce of deer blood." I giggled, then realized that he could resolve a question for me. "Did everyone at the wedding think I was pregnant?"

He grimaced. "I think you know the answer to that. They'll see how wrong they are when we go back. If you care."

"No, I don't care that much. It's just ... ironic. Or unfair. Or something. But when we go back –" I trailed off.

"Yes?" he asked, stroking my back again.

I closed my eyes a moment, then took the final step off the precipice. "Edward, I think we shouldn't bother buying our books for next quarter."

He became a statue as I spoke.

"I want to go back to Forks for the break and spend Christmas with Charlie, then go to Alaska. I'm ready." I took a breath. "Are you ready?"

He looked puzzled for an instant, and then, like Carlisle's, his face lighted up as if he had just been given the best present ever. "I am beyond ready," he said without hesitation. "Forgive me, I am, even with the three days and the thirst … I cannot wait for you to be safe. Safer. With me. Unbreakable. I'm… oh, God…" he rolled me to my back, pushing me into the mattress, and kissed me fervently all over my face and neck until I was breathless.

"Edward," I panted, and he pulled back to let me draw in some air. "Are you sure you don't want me to get my M.F.A. first?"

But he was too elated for teasing. "You can get any unmarketable degree you want later. Later. Now I just want _you,_" he said, and rolled us again so I was on top. "I can tell Carlisle to start making the arrangements, or do you want to?"

"It'd be more efficient if you did," I said, tracing his lower lip with my index finger. He sucked it into his mouth, and I kept it as still as I could as he wrapped it with his tongue, a promise of kisses to come.

"I have so often longed to be a human with you," he murmured after he released my finger, "but I'm going to love being a vampire with you."

"I have loved being human with you," I replied, kissing him in my chaste human way, "and I can't wait to be a vampire with you."

Our caresses became bolder, but Alice's voice niggled in my brain, and I blocked his hands as they crept up my ribs. Damn Alice. But I had promised her.

"Edward, I need to tell you something else … something maybe related, but I don't want you to think it's a cause and effect," I said. I was sad to see his face tighten.

"I should have realized," he said flatly. "I couldn't understand why you thought I'd object to your change at this point."

"It's nothing major … I don't think. For a little while, I have been experiencing some tremors –it's not painful," I hurriedly added, seeing the alarm on his face. "Their appearance doesn't really have any rhyme or reason, and they go away on their own, but when I touch you, they go away much more quickly."

He moved so he was sitting up, back against the headboard, allowing him to look down at me sternly. "Go on," he said with unnatural calm.

"Well, that day," I grunted a little as I sat up myself so I didn't feel quite so pinned down by his fierce stare, and I couldn't help pulling up the sheet to cover my chest in reflexive defensiveness, "that day we went to Norwich and you stopped the car because you thought I was hyperventilating –"

"Dammit, Bella, that's not 'a little while,' that's weeks!" He looked furious now.

"I wanted to talk to Carlisle first, to see if it was something I needed to be concerned about …" I trailed off, because his eyes seemed to be growing more agitated even as the rest of his body was immobile. "It's like … how often do women fear that they're pregnant, waiting and worrying for their period to come, but they're not? And you have to decide whether to make your boyfriend as worried as you are, or just wait it out until you can do the drugstore pregnancy test because everything's probably just fine? You probably know this better than anyone."

"True, but how do _you_ know?" I looked at him for a second, and he said, "Renee?"

"She's a bit of an oversharer, and … well, I would have preferred not sharing some of those experiences with her. So I didn't want to freak you out until I'd at least tried to figure out what was going on. Because you are bit of an overworrier."

He let out a frustrated growl, and yanked at his hair. "Bella," he said curtly, "you realize that we are married? Sickness and health? I want to know if something is worrying you even if you think it's probably nothing. Just as you want to know if something is bothering me. I know you do, because you've said it directly. You may have married an 'overworrier,' but that is _who I am_. And," he added pointedly, "it's not going to change."

"I'm sorry," I said in a small voice.

He inhaled and exhaled. "Thank you. I take it that you talked to Carlisle when I went hunting at Daniel's? What did he say?"

"Um, that he hadn't heard of something like this, but he theorized that I might be having an overdose of Cullen love."

"What?" He sounded incredulous.

"You know, if I'm your personal brand of heroin, then you're my brand of … of Ecstasy. And something about vegetarianism making you guys more, um, ardent lovers."

He was silent for a moment. "Yes, I used to think you couldn't be strong enough to handle the intensity of the feelings I had for you," he said quietly, eventually. I started to protest, but he put a finger on my lips and went on, "You proved me wrong, I know."

"Carlisle said that to me too."

Edward snorted at that. "He should tell _me_ these things," he complained.

"Don't blame Carlisle. I emphasized to him that I was approaching him as a doctor."

"Did the doctor at least say how you were physically?"

"He said I smelled fine," I reported.

To my surprise, Edward seemed comforted by this. Then I realized that a patient's just breathing in his presence would usually be enough for Carlisle to make a diagnosis. For him, practically every medical test was an unnecessary one. Heh. Vampire doctors: the solution to runaway American medical costs.

"Can you truly wait to the end of the quarter to go home?" Edward asked, pulling me away from musings about social policy.

"Yes," I said. "As long as you're with me. And I'd like to be able to get through finals here as a human, just to see if I can do it."

We spent quite a long time after that with Edward quizzing me on the when, where, duration and strength of the tremors, growing frustrated at my human memory and his inability to see a pattern. He pointed out that I had, as in the car, experienced them even though he had just been touching me, so perhaps Carlisle's theory was wrong.

"How about this?" I finally said wearily. "The tremors all occurred within 24 hours of our making love."

"Very funny," Edward said with an edge to his voice. "Since August, _everything_ in our lives has occurred within 24 hours of our making love."

"Mmmm, and I've loved it. Tell you what, I'm going to sleep now, and you can obsess about this to your heart's content by yourself." I turned my back to him and closed my eyes.

Despite his remaining pique, he pulled me against his chest, molding his body perfectly to mine, until I dropped off. I might have heard him say, "In truth, it's 22 hours and 37 minutes," but I wasn't sure.

* * *

I woke up the next morning to find Edward in a mood more in keeping with the theme of the weekend – urgent, yes, and intent on helping me with my morning stretches, his wonderfully hot flesh aiding in my yoga-improved flexibility as I hooked my ankle around his neck. _Yes, yes, yes_, I moaned, until I started to thrash under him.

'That's it, baby, that's it," he crooned, moving in me steadily even as I slammed my head into the pillow. "I can feel you come all around me, every pulse of your body, because you're mine, mine forever…."

I at last gained control of my hips to match his pushes, and scraped my teeth along his shoulder. It was my turn to make him fall apart. He gasped, and I did it again, snapping at his flesh.

"Envious?" I murmured.

"You can't imagine," he ground out.

I deliberately ignored a tacit limit. "You'll be able to bite me as much as you want, _soon,_" I told him, "because you're my mate."

Then he hardened in me impossibly more, and I felt that one thrust, different from all the rest, that signaled his release. He was _mine. _And so were his cries and moans and the exquisite stillness of his body as he came above me.

"You are bad, Mrs. Cullen, bad," he said as I slipped my leg down his arm to rest on the mattress, but his words had no heat in them, and he grinned. "Just for that, you have to let me make breakfast this time."

I had to admit that the pancakes were delicious.

We returned to bed to for me to digest and to divvy up the newspaper like the old married couple we were … on average. But after some time with the book review I slid further under the covers and turned to watch Edward speed-read the business section. He was so beautiful in his concentration.

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be with a human?" he asked suddenly, tossing the paper to the floor. Whoa. I was so wrong in thinking that he was focusing on earnings per share.

"No. Are you asking that because of Tanya?"

"To a degree. And because of your little episode of boundary-pushing earlier."

I looked at him closely, but his face was untroubled. Thank goodness. He wasn't asking a tortured question stemming from his fears about my missing out on something, even something he'd hate.

"Do you wonder what it would be like to be with a vampire?" I asked in return.

"I think about what it will be like to be with you, so I have to say yes," he answered. "But I know I'll find out one day. You, on the other hand, will not."

"How do you know? I could turn out to be a succubus like Tanya or Kate, and then I'll find out plenty from Alaskan oil-riggers," I said. As if. But he immediately looked alarmed, and I had to giggle. I just wasn't a nice person. He didn't respond, and I waved a hand in front of his glazed eyes. "Hey, that couldn't happen, could it?"

"I don't think so," he said. There was some doubt in his voice, and I suspected that he'd be conducting some research with Carlisle the minute I fell asleep tonight. I felt guilty that I'd opened up a can of worms of worry and dumped it on his empty dinner plate.

"So no angst, right?" I prompted him.

"Bella, it's hard enough for me to listen to our classmates' entirely inappropriate thoughts about you as it is. But then to contemplate the possibility that you could be emitting the 'fuck me right now' vibe that Tanya does for eternity …" He looked unnerved. "I'd go unhinged even though I know that you could push away any man with your pinkie finger."

I've already said that I'm not a nice person. So this exhibition of Edward's jealousy at the thought of imaginary future guys hitting on me was inappropriately stimulating my adrenal glands or my ovaries or wherever my hormones were produced. I climbed on top of my husband and straddled him.

"Edward?"

"Bella?"

"Speaking of 'fuck me right now,'" I started. Apparently jealousy had some effect on the vampire equivalent of testosterone as well, because I didn't have to finish to get what I wanted.

_

* * *

_

_A/N: What, you thought I would make Tanya a bitch? No. __The thought of Bella having to spend the rest of her life with a conniving man-stealer as an in-law has always made me sad._

I_ was in a sorority. So I can indulge in sorority girl stereotypes (you can see the fic: Alice as an anorexic, Bella as a bulimic, Rosalie realizing she bats for the other team, Esme as the drunken house mother). And I have nothing against Kappas particularly - their letter just worked best._

_More thanks to solareclipses for her recs! And to all of you for sticking with this._

_One art link, to a sexy Galatea, on my profile page._

_One chapter left, but I'm pretty sure there will be an epilogue. _


	16. Chapter 16: MPR

_Disclaimer: I have no claim on the characters of "Twilight," though I should charge them rent for taking up so much space in my head._

_Keep in mind, there will be an epilogue to this._

* * *

Ch. 16: MPR

**To: cswan at forkspd . wa . us**  
**From: isc1901 at dartmouth . edu**  
**Subject: winter break**

_Hey, Dad,_

_How is everything going back home? Did you get my postcard from Paris yet? You should definitely take Sue there someday – and you can stay in Carlisle and Esme's apartment (don't worry, Esme volunteered it, I didn't ask; she likes having visitors there to check up on the place, and who better than an old family friend who's also a cop?)._

_We're still planning to be in Forks for the break, but I wanted to give you a heads up: It looks as if Edward is going to be awarded a fellowship for next quarter to do a project in the former Soviet republics assessing the effects of the shrinking of the Aral Sea on the surrounding population, and I'd go with him, of course. It's a big honor for a freshman, so he's thrilled. I'm less thrilled because I'm having to get a lot of shots, but it's better than getting polio, I guess. Maybe I'll learn enough Russian or whatever to get out of my language requirement here. Anyway, there's a chance that we'll have to cut our time in Forks short …_

Edward kissed the top of my head as I wrote. I had figured that lying to a cop would be easier by e-mail; I would tackle Renee by phone, on which Edward could field most of her questions and charm her into acceptance at a safe distance.

"Charlie will have a hard time investigating a car crash in Kazakhstan, if that's what we need to do," Edward said. Alice was still working on the best arrangement for my death.

"I know," I said quietly. "Do I have a will?"

"We can have our lawyer draw one up quickly. Do you want everything to go to Renee and Charlie?"

"Yeah. I suppose Jake would refuse anything I left him."

"I would if I were he," Edward agreed. His voice was unnaturally smooth, and I shook my head at the stupidity of male pride. I regretted Jacob's revulsion at my choice, but it was _my_ choice.

At least Charlie would get enough from me to retire to some fisherman's paradise. But I knew he would always stay in Forks.

* * *

Sun rays slanted into the windows of the psych classroom as the last class of the quarter drew to a close, and even before I felt my phone vibrate with Edward's text I knew he wouldn't be able to meet me here - there was no safely shady route from Yefimov's class to my building. I scowled and gathered up my things, skirted the students clustered around Professor Weisbrot seeking advice before the final exam, and sped downstairs, eager to get Edward and get home.

Max's long legs caught up with me outside the building, though, as I dug out my sunglasses from my knapsack. I guess Edward hadn't scared him off all Cullens. "Have you talked to Lonnie?" he asked. She hadn't shown for class today.

"Briefly," I said, slipping on the glasses as we headed toward Main Street. I was sure that Lonnie had answered my call only at the urging of Tanya, who would know that I'd need more reassurance than any of Lonnie's other friends about her well-being. "She sounded fine."

To be honest, she sounded completely love-stoned. Pretty much the way anyone would sound if an overwhelmingly enthralling succubus started kissing her neck while she was on the phone.

"She hasn't answered any of my texts," Max said plaintively, bewilderment on his handsome face. I suspected that what with Lonnie, Rosalie, me and now Tanya, he wasn't used to such indifference from women.

"Young love," I said as casually as I could.

Max zipped up his parka and looked at me. "Aren't you freezing?" he asked, pointing at my open jacket.

"Really, you're cold? I guess it doesn't get very chilly back home in Santa Barbara," I replied, and then stopped on the sidewalk, nodding toward my parallel-parked Mercedes. "Besides, I'm not going far. Here's my car."

"Whoa," he said, staring at my armored ninja-vehicle. "That's really ... something."

"Yeah, I know," I said with resignation.

"I've never seen anything like that, Bella. Where did you get it?" he asked, but I heard him only distantly. For there was a silhouette behind the tinted glass of the car, and I knew it couldn't be Edward. I needed to get Max out of here.

"Bella?" Max repeated when I didn't answer.

"A dealer in Seattle," I lied. "Listen, you should, uh -"

The whirr of the passenger side window halted my floundering. "Bella," came a familiar, deceptively dulcet voice from inside the car. _Rosalie._ "Get in." I took a big breath, bid a quick goodbye to Max, and did as ordered.

"Is everyone all right? How did you get here?" I asked, my fear turning to worry. I saw her glance in the rear view mirror at a once-again perplexed Max even as she deftly pulled out of the parking spot in one movement, missing the car in front of us by mere millimeters.

"Everyone's fine," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "That boneheaded boy's in my organic chem class."

"Yeah, Max says you're really fast on the clicker." Organic chem was so big that the professor kept track of the students by giving them handheld devices on which they had to press buttons to answer questions and sign in for class.

"Damn. It's hard not to compete with those obnoxious pre-meds."

"Rosalie," I said with some impatience. "Why are you here? _How_ are you here?"

"I drove in with Emmett and made a discreet transfer blocked by the Jeep, and then Emmett went on to pick up Edward, so don't worry," she answered. "I decided that we should talk."

"_You_ decided that we should talk," I repeated flatly. "I guess I don't have much choice in the matter, do I?" My worry had now turned into annoyance. Rosalie could really use a few sessions at the Tanya School of Charm.

"No, you don't," she responded.

Her eyes darted to me as I huffed and pulled out my phone to text Edward. "I imagine he's even more protective of you now that you've set a date," she remarked. I thought for a searing moment of his possessive, hungry kisses before I went into my class, when he dragged me into a psych professor's temporarily empty office and lifted me onto the desk ... Wait. I knew what this conversation was going to be about. "Edward told me," she added when I looked at her sharply.

_**have been kidnapped by ro**_. I typed. _**home as soon as i can escape.**_

The reply came in flash. _**Why?**_

_**take a guess, mr talkative**_, I answered.

_**Sorry. Whatever she says, consider the source.**_

I shook my head at the screen. Could he really believe that Rosalie would make me change my mind?

Meanwhile, Rosalie whipped out her cell and read her own text, disobeying several traffic laws at once. She snickered. "He's telling me not to harass his wife. Hah."

She raced out of town, then took the fork to the river road, passing red barns and black and white cows in a blur. She had commandeered the music as well as my car; something Minimalist played, mournful strings that gave way to a cacophony of static and feedback. The car made a squealing left at an old graveyard, the grass frozen and brown around the timeworn headstones, then bumped along a track till Rosalie stopped it at the edge of some denuded woods.

"It's a short walk to the river," Rosalie said, and, sighing loudly, I followed her into the forest.

It was indeed a short, if mucky, walk, and we came out on a rocky ledge above the Connecticut. The trees were dense on the Vermont side opposite us, and the river here was a little oxbow, giving us privacy; we would hear any boaters long before they could see us. The afternoon sun bounced off the ripples in the river, which was much higher now, in late fall, than when Edward and I first crossed it in September. The sun also played on Rosalie's exposed skin - she'd surely chosen this spot to remind me of the Cullen oddity that was hardest to explain away.

"We all know that you've set a date –" she said without preamble.

"Are you trying to tell me what an immature idea this is again? It's not going to work," I interrupted her, my irritation with her growing.

Rosalie shrugged and stared at the water; a breeze off the river pulled at her diaphanous miniskirt. Looking at her, coatless and sleeveless – _that _made me feel cold.

"At this point, either you do it yourself, or the Volturi will do it for you, and perhaps take some of us down in the process," she said. "As everyone insists on repeating to me, it's hard to object considering the circumstances. Perhaps if I had some vampire time machine, I'd go back and try to talk some sense into you two. But you don't have a choice now, do you?

"So this is what I wanted to impress this on you: when you change, _you no longer change_. This is it. Your personality flaws, your tics, your fears, your regrets. Your doubts about being in this life. They're permanent. You won't grow out of them. Your human memories of that dog may be clouded, but any unfinished business you have with him will forever niggle at you. Or, you know, you never told your mother off for forgetting to come see you in the school play ..."

"Believe me, Rosalie, I was never in the school play," I said, cutting off her rambling.

She shrugged again. "Whatever your hang-ups are," she said. "I love my brother too much to see him saddled with some discontented regretful woman for eternity."

I gaped at her a moment, but her gaze remained on the river. Edward had said that I didn't see myself clearly, but I had nothing on Rosalie, who didn't realize that her brother had been living with a discontented regretful woman since 1933.

"I wouldn't want that either," I said once I got over being flabbergasted. "Is it really that ... well, set in stone, though? Edward has changed so much since I've met him."

"He has changed," she acknowledged, glancing at me. "But don't you see, that's _because_ he met you. It takes something monumental for us to change. If I hadn't come upon Emmett ..."

She looked back at the river. She looked so much like a statue here on the rock edge, Nike on her prow, draperies streaming behind her. "Being assaulted and left for dead by the man you planned to marry, then being told that you can never see your family again and that you'll be spending eternity avoiding the sun, doesn't put you in the best mood," she said. "I was horrible during those years.

"And I was a product of the times – I blamed myself for what happened; I shouldn't have been out on my own at night, I shouldn't have worn that dress. I shouldn't have resisted, I should have resisted more ... I felt so powerless, and even killing everyone who wronged me didn't erase that. It was Emmett who was able to convince me that I had everything all twisted – my backwoods boy was more enlightened than I was, with my big city education. Don't laugh," she said. "Being from Rochester meant something back then. "

"Why would I laugh?" I said. "I'm from Forks."

"The point," she went on, "is that finding Emmett allowed me to move on. But you've already met your mate, so you won't have that opportunity. I mean, I was so devastated by my experience of sex that if I hadn't met Emmett, I would have been just as celibate as Edward was for all those decades. I would have been in the same state of stasis as he was."

I shook my head at her. "I don't get it," I said. "You had a horrible experience. He didn't."

"No, you don't get it," she said with scorn. "Look, I think Esme was right when she suggested that Edward had been transformed too young, so young that he couldn't fall in love. Or more accurately, in desire - to desire a real woman of flesh and blood …" She tilted her head pensively. "Or stone … instead of just the vague idea of one. You know, when Edward was a teenager, people may have married a little earlier, but they started necking a lot later."

"You mean –"

"I mean that you woke him up. And it was only the profound change that meeting his mate wrought in him that allowed him to move forward. No other woman would do. Not I – " she rolled her eyes "—and not Tanya. Not the Sexual Revolution, not nine decades of hearing Jessica Stanley's and everyone else's sexual fantasies. Not even decades of hearing _us_. "

"He was Sleeping Beauty," I murmured, remembering our teasing conversation in Chicago about the extent of his sexual experience.

Rosalie snorted derisively. "Right. And you're Prince Charming, and Carlisle's teeth are the spindle that put Beauty to sleep. Go write a thesis on it. But I think that's what happened. And that's why I wanted to have this conversation with you. Is there anything that's unresolved for you, anything that you're worried about?"

I considered her a moment. She was trying to help, albeit in a way that made you want to tell her to jump off the cliff we were standing on. But I had made my choice and set my date, and there were no more agonies of indecision. It was only that...

"I do have one fear," I admitted finally, looking down and trying to knock the mud off my boots. "You had said that afterward I'll want only one thing. I'm worried that I'll forget Edward, that I'll forget what we have together."

Rosalie turned to face me then. "It was true when I said it," she acknowledged. "And don't get me wrong, you will crave blood in the most primal way. But seeing you two these last months… " She trailed off, then added, "I'd never say this in front of Emmett, because he'd immediately set odds on it, but I'd bet you'll attack Edward before a deer."

"You think I'll hurt him?" I asked, horrifying visions speeding through my head.

"No," she said, laughing. "I think you'll hurt only his clothes. And perhaps your sense of dignity."

I glared at her, annoyed. "So you think I'll be sex-crazed."

"Hey, you're the one who suggested to the moodiest, most worry-prone vampire in North America that you might become a succubus. Thanks for that, by the way. Carlisle and I had a _fabulous_ few hours trying to reassure Edward that it was unlikely, and it was a much less entertaining conversation than the cunnilingus one. In fact, I don't know that you couldn't become Tanya's apprentice, but Carlisle was quite adamant that it wouldn't happen to you."

"Edward talked to you about that?" I asked, disconcerted. I had suspected that he'd be calling his father about my silly suggestion, but I wouldn't have thought there would be another conference call with Rosalie.

"He meant to talk to me and Carlisle about your tremors, but that came up as well." When I looked at her dubiously, she reminded me, "I've been to medical school too."

"Fine. Did you have any theories?"

"At this point, does it matter?" Rosalie said dismissively. "You've made up your mind. I did suggest that you might have developed some rapid-acting form of Parkinson's –"

"Why would you torture Edward like that?" I interrupted angrily. "You really are a bitch sometimes."

"But you love me anyway."

"No, I'm not sure I do."

There was no other word for it: she hooted. "You don't have much choice in the matter," she said. "But at least you'll go to your death not being afraid of me, by the looks of it."

Huh. "I guess not," I said.

"So, we're moving to Alaska," she said more soberly.

"Sorry," I said. "I know you hate moving."

"It's okay. We've had to move for Emmett and me ... to keep up my reputation as an avenging ghost. Besides, you're probably killing Edward, right now." She raised her hand to stop my question. "Mentally. I'm sure he wants you more every day, and you're still a soap bubble. Ectoplasm. A jellyfish. We don't start off strong and peter off, we get stronger. You and Edward have nothing on Esme and Carlisle. Hell, you have nothing on me and Em," she said with satisfaction.

"But you're still worried about my changing," I said.

"Yes. If you screw it up somehow, or he does, that's going to kill my brother too. Remember how I said finding your mate profoundly changes you?" I nodded once more, and she went on, her voice harsh. "There's one other thing that does that: losing your mate."

* * *

The next evening I was at the dining room table typing out my last art history essay when my phone rang.

"Hey, sis, what's up?" I greeted Alice as Edward looked up from his own laptop.

"Hi, Bella! I'm calling to ask Edward to ski with us tomorrow. The weather will be perfect!"

"And you also forecast that Edward's phone would be broken, so you had to call me?"

"No, I forecast that he would say no, and not even tell you about it," she answered. Indeed, Edward was looking mulish. And while I didn't want to be away from him all day, I knew he would love to go skiing. In fact, why couldn't I blow off studying for finals and come too? I'd just have to stick to the beginners' -

"Sorry, sweetie, but no, you can't come along," Alice said, as Edward's expression shifted from intransigent to alarmed. "You won't be able to ski with us."

"But you said the weather would be perfect!" I complained.

"Perfect for us to ski the back country, but too sunny for us to be in public. We'd be too glam-rock," she explained, as Edward shook his head as if she were in the room with us. Which in a way, she was, because she continued, "Sorry, you're too young for that reference. Lots of glitter in the '70s. Anyway. you can go ski with the humans … hmm, yes, call your pig-farming friend, that's a good idea. I'll set up lessons for you two. Edward, she'll be fine."

I wasn't sure that my brain worked fast enough for me to have even contemplated asking Krissy to go skiing with me, but I made an agreeable noise anyway. Edward looked calmer now.

"Is Tanya going with you?" I asked.

"Um, we haven't seen much of her lately," Alice said delicately.

"I guess I won't ask Lonnie, then. I hope Tanya gives her time to pass her finals. Dammit," I said abruptly. "I think I left my snow pants back in Forks."

"Bella," Alice said with an edge of irritation in her voice, "man up and go explore your closet."

"Oh. Sorry. I'll go take a look. Hold on," I said, walking into my bedroom as Edward followed. "Where?"

"In the back, to the left," Alice directed me. I pawed through the clothes hanging on the bar. Jeez, there really was a lot of stuff in here. And there it was, a one-piece ski outfit. It looked sleek and expensive and -

"It's … fuchsia, Alice," I said in horror once I saw it clearly in the light of the bedroom. "Bright fuchsia."

"Fuchsia is always bright. That way no one can miss you."

"You mean, no one can miss me sprawled out in the snow," I grumbled.

"Exactly. Trust me, Bella, you have to wear it for Edward's peace of mind," Alice said in my ear.

"And a helmet," Edward broke in.

"But I'll be on the bunny slope!"

"And a helmet," Edward repeated.

Krissy was game for trying skiing, though she whined about the Hotness being too busy with school work to come with us, and the next morning I drove her and her suitemates Anna and Evan an hour into the Green Mountains. The Dartmouth Skiway was nearer to town, but that would put me farther from Edward and the other Cullens than he liked, so we were going to a big resort that my heavy Mercedes could reach on easy-to-navigate roads. Edward had left the same time I had, dressed all in white (to be less noticeable on slopes that were decidedly not on any ski resorts' maps) and looking much too delicious for me to let out of the house. But I did, pouting as I headed to campus, and he watched me disappear before running through the woods to Fenwick.

On the drive through Vermont, Anna and Evan debated Klosters versus St. Moritz while Krissy and I rolled our eyes at the children of privilege in the back seat. Okay, Anna had the excuse of actually growing up in Switzerland, but Scarsdale Boy didn't.

"I once slid down a really high haystack," Krissy finally announced, which shut off their prattling about Swiss skiing.

"Have you really never skied before, Bella?" Evan asked. "Because I hear that there are mountains in Washington, not just haystacks and piles of pig manure." Krissy turned around and sent a rude gesture his way.

"There are," I said. There was even a ski area near Port Angeles, but I was never in a position or, last year, state of mind, to try it. "But sports were not really my thing. I've got much better health insurance now, though."

I did, too. Edward had insisted, just in case.

The ski resort was more developed than I had expected, lots of bland, recently built apartment buildings and townhouses huddled together. The path to the ski school led through a sort of outdoor shopping mall of buildings with half-timbering and sharply pitched roofs, and Anna stopped short when she saw it, putting her gloved fist to her mouth and shaking her head.

"It's a fake Alpine Swiss village," she said, her German accent heightened by her incredulousness. "The village of Ersatz."

"Or Faux," Evan suggested.

"Yes, the village of Faux-Ersatz-Imitazione," Anna agreed. "This is so _American_."

We changed into our ski clothes, Anna in a pricey-looking black ski suit, Krissy in bulky snow pants and parka. They were politely neutral about my hot fuchsia getup, with Anna murmuring only, "I don't ever think I've seen that color in a Bogner." After they collected their equipment, she and Evan headed to the top of the mountain, while Rafael the Chilean ski instructor took charge of Krissy and me.

I asked him how he could abide living in perpetual winter, shuttling between ski seasons in Vermont and Santiago, and he assured me that he loved what he did so much that it didn't bother him at all. I hoped it'd be that way for me. And there was always Isle Esme ...

Under Rafael's patient tutelage, Krissy and I mastered the magic carpet and the tiny incline for novices, then moved on to the chair lift and the beginners' slopes. I was surprised to see that a good number of skiers wore helmets like me. Too bad the helmet couldn't hide the fuchsia.

The other surprise was that I was ... actually competent at skiing. The turns were a piece of cake, and the feeling of speeding over the snow was exhilarating. I never fell, so Rafael made me do it purposely a couple of times to make sure that I could get up by myself.

Figures that I'd find a sport I was good at just in time for it not to matter anymore.

When it was time to break for lunch, Rafael told me, "You and Krissy are progressing so differently. Do you want me to arrange for another instructor? I could take you on the more difficult slopes, and the other could work with Krissy."

He said her name "Kreee-seee." It was cute. And I was pretty sure that Krissy found Rafael, with his brown beard and ready smile, cute as well, because she was suddenly looking glum.

"Our other friends here are good skiers," I said. "You stay with Krissy and I'll ask them to take me on the intermediate runs."

Rafael and Krissy arranged to meet in an hour, and she and I put our skis in the outdoor racks and headed back to the lodge.

"Chile's a long way from Iowa," I noted as we trudged through the snow.

"I know," Krissy said, sighing. "I could go there. Isn't that wonderful?"

Over a rather unappetizing ski lodge lunch, I evaded Krissy's efforts to pay for her share of our outing, and I told her, Evan and Anna about Edward's faux-ersatz-imitazione fellowship in Fakistan to explain why I wasn't coming back next quarter, and why I probably wouldn't even be able to communicate with them much.

"Is the grant from the Walker Foundation? They do a lot of environmental stuff," Evan asked me.

"No, Pacific Northwest Trust. Um, it limits itself to applicants from the Pacific Northwest," I said hastily to discourage him from trying to apply himself, and was pleased that I sounded pretty convincing. Practice makes perfect.

Oh, wait. Crap. We were going to have to invent another website. Sorry, Jasper.

Not even Evan and Anna had been to Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan, so they couldn't ask me much that would reveal my own inability to tell the difference between the two. Instead, we spent the rest of lunch with Evan making "Borat" jokes. It was a relief to get back on the slopes.

And I continued to be a phenom for a beginning skier. I noted the lengthening shadows of the shortened New England day, and sadly made my final run as the lifts ground to a halt above me. Anna, Evan and I found Krissy, jubilant over exchanging phone numbers with Rafael, and I got to escape my fuchsia horror before heading through Faux Mall again to return to my car.

It ended up being the eye-rolling European who halted us in front of a crowded store that sold candy by the ounce. Or pound, more likely.

"Can we go in this shop?" Anna said excitedly. "I think it has Sugus." That turned out to be some Swiss fruit candy that Anna was suddenly nostalgic for, and Evan and Krissy decided to go in with her. The idea of being in a store packed with sugar-drunk skiers was vaguely nauseating, and I asked them to come get me from the coffee bar a little further along, after the giant tree festooned with lights that marked the center of the shopping area.

The coffee shop was cozy, with a fireplace and inoffensive Christmas music, but uncrowded - just me and a group of boisterous women around my age, one with a gold and green sweatshirt reading UVM that puzzled me for a moment. Oh, University of Vermont. I got tea at the counter in front, then flopped onto a leather sofa in back to tap out a text to Edward, one of several we'd exchanged during the day. I wasn't always able to answer his messages right away, which I knew had to drive him crazy, but he responded to mine instantly; apparently he could stop on a dime on a 90-degree mountainside. I stared into the fireplace and wondered how fast vampires could go on skis. I wondered if the friction would melt the ice under them.

A sudden silence jerked my attention from the fire. I knew that sound.

Edward was propped up negligently against the counter, looking lean and tall in black jeans and dark purple buttoned shirt with a subtle retro floral pattern on it – the shirt Alice had got him from the second-hand store in White River Junction, I thought. A ski jacket was the only remnant of his all-white garb of this morning, and his hair was even wilder than usual; he obviously had only recently pulled off the white knit hat he'd been wearing. My husband was just a fine-looking man.

I nearly growled when my view was partly obscured by one of the UVM girls who had stepped up to the counter to get a refill - and chat up said fine-looking husband. Their conversation was too low for me to hear, but I could see Edward run his left hand through his hair several times, the light glinting off his wedding ring. I was tempted to go rescue him, but I could also see that he had ordered a drink for some reason, and he hadn't acknowledged me, so I bided my time. Perhaps there was a threat nearby, I thought, a little coil of worry in my chest.

The UVM girl drifted away from the counter, shrugging sheepishly as she rejoined her friends. Edward took a mug from the barista, walked toward my sofa … and past me.

I watched him discreetly as he sat in an armchair several yards away, taking out his phone and paying no attention to me. His foot jiggled as he typed. My own phone pinged and I shoved aside the fuchsia fabric in my duffel bag to grab it.

_**Everything's fine**_, I read, and my knot of worry eased as I put away the phone.

But my puzzlement increased. So that meant ... we were playing a game? Well, if this competition involved ignoring each other, I could play it too. A real estate magazine lay on the coffee table in front of me. I opened it up, pretending to be absorbed in descriptions of overdesigned ski chalets, not glancing up even when a solid weight depressed the cushion next to me.

"Hello," a voice said softly.

I looked up warily at the gorgeous man sharing my sofa. "Hi," I said, and dropped my eyes back to the magazine, even though what I really wanted to do was straddle his hips and lick his neck.

"Um, my name is Tony," the voice went on and I looked up again. He was extending his right hand to me. He looked adorable and ... nervous?

I took his hand with feigned hesitation. It was warm from whatever was in his mug, and the feeling of relief was so intense that I had to close my eyes for a moment, even before I could figure out how to answer him. His eyes fluttered open with mine.

"Marie," I said, pulling my hand away with an effort.

"We sound almost like 'West Side Story,'" he remarked. Yay, finally a cultural reference I could get.

"Does that mean you're a Jet?"

He gave me a smile that showed only a sliver of his teeth. "I think I'm more of a Shark."

"Huh," I said skeptically. "You don't look like you're from Puerto Rico."

"White bread from Madison, Wisconsin, actually. You from Vermont?"

"No, I just go to school nearby."

"Dartmouth?" he guessed.

"Yeah," I said, shrugging as if Dartmouth were the functional equivalent of Peninsula College.

"I go to Northwestern. I applied to Dartmouth, but didn't get in," he said with perfectly simulated ruefulness.

I did my best to disguise my laugh as a cough. Edward did an excellent human ... and he was being human _for me_. I had told him that I'd never wondered what it would be like to be with a human, but he was going to do his best to give me that experience anyway. And in the process, apparently, he was going to try, for the first time in his existence, to pick up a woman – not just overwhelm a school secretary into changing his class schedule or a hostess into giving him a table in an overbooked restaurant, but persuade a woman to go home with him.

Admittedly, I was a pretty sure bet.

I heard a muttered "He may be gorgeous, but he's an asshole!" from the UVM girls and the subdued level of their conversation made me suspect that the married man next to me was being observed closely.

"I drove past the Northwestern campus this summer," I said, because it was true; the college was between Edward's childhood house and Chicago. "It looked really nice. Prettier than Dartmouth."

His eyes narrowed at me for a millisecond at my little insult to the college he had chosen for us, but he agreed, using the lazy enunciation of a teenage boy, "S'nice."

We spent a pleasant hour then of flirting and lying, and an agonizing one of keeping our hands away from each other. Still, it was great fun to make up an alter ego when there was nothing at stake, and I marveled at Edward's ability to put in just enough details to sound plausible. I also decided that I shouldn't make this too easy for him, and tried to invent my own details that rendered us incompatible. His Tony was sweet, young and awkward; my Marie had seen enough to affect sarcasm and world-weariness at 19.

Tony's father ran a software company and his mother was an alderwoman. Marie's parents were acrobats who left the circus when she was on the way, and opened a trapeze school in Phoenix. Tony had never been overseas; Marie told him about sleeping on the floor of the tiny flat of her friends Jean-Francois and Daniel in Paris. Tony was a fan of BMX and skateboards, horror movies and Midwestern bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Wilco, Gayngs and Husker Du (some of which I knew that Edward liked). Marie favored rock climbing and, naturally, trapeze flying (I could see Edward's lips press together to hold back a laugh), Katharine Hepburn movies and European electronica. Tony liked beer, bratwurst and the Brewers; Marie was a wine-loving vegetarian who hated baseball. Marie had a cat back home; Tony had a huge husky whose excessive drooling and inappropriate scratching he described with perverse enjoyment.

Tony had started a Young Republicans club in high school in reaction to all the reflexive liberalism in Madison; even though the club was somewhat tongue in cheek he was majoring in political science and thinking of becoming a politician like his mother. Marie's parents were spots of blue in a very red state who were appalled she had decided to attend Dartmouth, and she was majoring in English lit "until I decide to move to a cabin in the middle of the forest where there's not another human being around."

Tony looked thoughtful at that, then asked Marie to describe what it was like to fly. It was my turn to narrow my eyes at him. Jerk. He had to know that I'd never been on a trapeze.

At least Renee had taken me to the circus a few times. _Here goes._

"It's a very sensual experience, actually," I began dreamily, looking off into the distance. "You start at the bottom of the ladder and the anticipation builds as you climb up, and your stomach flip-flops. You reach the platform and you clip the wire onto your harness and your body tightens all over. And then you grab the bar and jump into the abyss." I stretched my hands above my head and swayed to demonstrate, though what I was mimicking had nothing to do with trapezes. "There's no feeling like it. You fly back and forth, in and out, higher and higher until you reach the peak, your body undulating under the force of your thrusts, and you have your release … from the bar … and glide down, panting and ecstatic and spent, into the net. And when you have a _partner_ –"

"Would you like more tea?" he interrupted me, and I saw with satisfaction that he needed me to say yes even if I didn't really want anything to drink. He hurriedly went to fetch me a new cup, and I noticed that the Vermont girls had left.

"Perhaps I should have asked you before I got this," he nodded toward the tea mug in his hand when he returned, "but would you like to have dinner with me? It's getting -"

"Oh!" I said abruptly. "My friends were supposed to meet me here, and I forgot all about them." I dived for my phone, but of course it was pinging as I touched it.

_**J and I driving the warmbloods home in the Jeep**_, Alice wrote, and I remembered that she'd met Krissy on the orientation hike. _**Ro and Em doing something in the snow.**_

I turned back to my companion. "Apparently, I've been abandoned. What do you suggest? Is there a decent restaurant here?"

He looked nervous again. "Um, would you be okay hanging out at the house I'm staying at?" he asked, his voice cracking a bit. _Nice_. "I could cook."

"You have a house here?" I asked. Just how much real estate did we own?

"It belongs to a friend from Northwestern, his family, I mean. He had to leave this morning, but he's letting me crash there a few days."

I looked at him a long moment, weighing his offer, and he started to look even more uneasy. "Okay," I said finally, agreeing to something a policeman's daughter would never do, but apparently an acrobat's child would, then I reconsidered. "Wait. Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Nah," he said, cupping my left hand with his warm one and stroking my ring with his thumb. "Do you?"

"A girlfriend? No."

Instead of giving me Edward's eye roll, he looked deliciously, humanly befuddled for a moment before he said, "I meant boyfriend."

"No boyfriend, either. You?"

"No boyfriend," he said, laughing now.

I cocked my head at him, recalling a conversation we'd had the first night Edward spent in my bed in Forks. I remembered every word and knew that he would remember it even longer. "We have that one thing in common at least," I said.

* * *

We stopped in a little food and liquor store in Faux – where Tony complained about the exorbitant prices in a way Edward never would - before walking past several clusters of town houses to the edge of the resort development. When I saw the interior of Tony's borrowed house, I immediately knew that Esme had never been here: it was all poufy chintz sofas, glass-topped coffee tables, pastel landscapes on the wall, the staples of chain hotels. Sliding glass doors off the living room led to a deck where thick steam from a hot tub rose in the cold air.

I lifted my eyebrows at Tony, and he looked embarrassed. "It's on a timer, so it's ready when you get home from skiing," he explained, and I smirked at the novel idea of using a hot tub for soaking sore muscles.

He opened the prosecco we had bought, and poured flutes for both of us; it wasn't very good, I thought, and snorted at myself for being to think that. Somehow the golden liquid disappeared from his glass as he made omelets for vegetarian Marie and I searched the cabinets. I found dishes and a few candles and set the table for two just in time for him to slide the omelets onto our plates.

A public radio station played a tinny song - "Careless Love," Tony told me, displaying a surprising knowledge of old blues music for a college freshman as Bessie Smith sang, "_You fly to my head like wine_" - and we talked about our schools, and the fake rock that Northwestern students painted purple and white for homecoming and the bonfire tower Dartmouth students made for their homecoming, and the lousiness of our respective football teams.

I inhaled my omelet – the man certainly had a way with eggs – and his slowly diminished on his plate. I knew he had to be hiding it in his napkin, but I never saw it. Perhaps that was because I kept being distracted by his fidgeting; he shifted in his seat, rubbed his chin, tapped his foot in a way I was no longer accustomed to.

"You're not eating much. Are you all right?" I asked to get him back a little for the trapeze question.

He scratched the back of his neck. "I'm just excited that you're here," he said shyly, and in the light of the peach and pink candles he almost appeared to be blushing.

"I am too," I said softly, and we were silent for a few moments.

"Would you like to try the hot tub?" he asked suddenly.

"I don't have a bathing suit," I said, certain that Alice hadn't been able to get at my duffel bag today.

"I won't look," he said hopefully, and I had to laugh and agree. Besides, Marie struck me as a woman who was pretty comfortable with her body.

He went in first while I undressed in the bathroom and tied up my hair. When I walked out with towels, hissing at the frozen wood of the deck on my bare feet, he was facing the other direction on the far side of the round tub, looking over a snowy meadow that ended in woods and the dark bulk of a mountain beyond. The walls rose high on both sides of the deck for privacy.

I exhaled a great gust as I slid into the bubbling water, tilting my head back to look at the blanket of stars above. Would the earth get so screwed up one day, unable to support the animals we needed, that we'd have to search out another planet? Leonardo had better stop fooling around with video games and invent a palatable blood substitute instead ...

"Is it safe for me to turn around?" he asked, dislodging the depressing thought from my head.

"Sure."

He glided toward me, his skin pale despite the heat of the water. I wondered if anybody else would have noticed that or the absence of a condensation trail when he spoke, or if they would simply be stunned by the shape of his shoulders as he moved, the smooth muscles of his chest. I was entranced by it all.

Tony sank onto the ledge seat a polite distance away, carefully keeping his eyes away from my bare breasts just below the surface of the water. "Do you know any constellations?" he asked.

"Just the usual, the Dippers and Orion. You?"

"No," he lied.

"There's Orion's belt," I said, lifting my arm out of the water to point, and I caught him looking. He hastily averted his gaze, and I smiled.

"It's okay to look," I murmured, and went on, because I was feeling the need brought on by hours without contact, "and touch."

He inhaled sharply and scooted over on the ledge of the tub until his thigh was next to mine. "Is this okay?" he asked, and slid his arm around my shoulders.

I nodded, but it was not _okay_. Our roles called for the tentative touching of a couple just starting to explore each other, and instead the meeting of our skin made us gasp.

"Wow," he said, in a completely un-Edwardly way.

"Yeah," I breathed. "Do you want me to show you another constellation?"

"Yeah."

I pointed to the skin just below my left ear. "Here," I said, "is a constellation of three freckles, or so I'm told."

"By whom?" he asked, suddenly jealous and grammatical.

"My mom," I said innocently. I tilted my head away from him.

Tony was a bit clueless. "I don't see them," he said, tilting his own head in puzzlement.

"Look closer," I encouraged him, even though they didn't exist.

He finally took the hint, and I nearly slid under the water from the sensation of his lips on my neck at last. Tony's rescue of me was quick, but fumbling, his hands grazing many of my soft parts before I was laughing and upright on his lap, something familiar pressing against my flank.

I looked down into the water before smiling up at him knowingly. He looked discomfited again, and tried to move his hips back. "Sorry," he mumbled.

"Don't worry. I like it."

He swallowed and looked away. "I should tell you that I've been with only one woman," he said quietly, sounding vulnerable and young. It gave me an unexpected surge of confidence.

"That's okay," I purred. "I have _lots_ of experience."

His head whipped around, eyes wild and possessive, and I nuzzled his throat to remind him exactly how I had gained all that experience. We kissed cold faces, pretending that humans didn't use their tongues, our fingers twisting into each other's hair, the buoyancy of the water preventing me from resting heavily on his hard thighs.

"Let me show you what I like," I murmured, surprised by how much I was enjoying being Marie, and shifted so my back was to his chest, his erection captured between us.

"Please," he said almost inaudibly, sending a breath of air onto my wet shoulder that made me shiver in the bubbling water.

Our movements were an imperfect inverse of those we made before the mirror in Chambre 8 at Jean-François and Daniel's house. I put my hands on top of his, guiding them to my shoulders, up my neck and down over my collarbones. His heavy breaths kept time with mine.

I pulled our right hands and our lefts apart so they could trail down my sides, into the water around my torso, warming before ascending over my breasts. My fingers manipulated his to caress the curves, stroke the waiting tips. Edward would murmur sweet nothings or dirty somethings, his lips at my ear, as his hands moved on me, but Tony was apparently too shy. So it was up to me.

"Oh, that feels good," I moaned softly, and his hips convulsed under my bottom as my swaying pushed his erection into my skin. "That's perfect."

Our left hands stayed put, and I pushed our rights down over the slope of my stomach and farther, my clit swollen and slick, and our fingers circled on it. He would memorize every move I made, I knew. Stuttering little noises came from me, and his hand slipped down from under mine and his finger slid in. Cheat, I thought abstractedly. He'd somehow sneaked in some of the lube I needed in the water even though that seemed a highly unlikely item for Tony to be carrying around. Oh, hell, I wasn't going to complain.

"That's it, yes, yes," I cried, thrashing under our hands, arching my back and shoving against his cock, making him moan. I twisted around, ready to take advantage of the contraband lube and push down his length, but his hands stayed my hips.

"Wait," he rasped out, and I looked at him in disbelief.

"_Why_?"

"I don't have any …thing out here."

It took a moment for my hormone-addled brain to figure out what he was saying. Tony and Marie, if they had a smidgen of sense, would use protection. I couldn't help my frustrated sound.

"I have something inside," he said. "In the bedroom."

"Thank _God_."

"Damn, it's cold," Tony muttered as we dashed out of the tub into the warmth of the condo, dripping on the beige carpet. He shivered convincingly as I dried him off. "There's an … an electric blanket on the bed," he said, stammering a bit, and we made it into the dark bedroom and tumbled onto the double bed, yanking away the duvet and too many pillows and pulling warm sheets around us. The candles from the living room faintly illuminated the bed, lighting our arms as we groped each other enthusiastically. I threw my leg over his hip to bring him closer, to press the silky wetness on his tip to my sex.

"Oh, fuck … _wait,_" he said again, and rolled to the edge of the bed. "Let me …." He trailed off, opening a drawer in the bedside table and pulling out a black foil square.

Okay, so Marie was a little clueless too.

He rolled back and knelt beside me. The foil made a crinkling noise as he ripped it. I propped myself up on my elbows for a better view, because while Marie may have seen this many times before, Bella never had, and probably never would again. He pinched the tip of the condom a second, then rolled it down his length. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, but he seemed to glance down at the result with a degree of doubt, and he looked at me uncertainly.

I figured it was time to take the initiative again. "Lie back," I murmured, shoving on his knee. He obeyed, and I crawled over him, drawing up the blankets to cover us.

"I like being on top," I told him, adjusting my hips to catch him at my entrance and sliding down slowly and up, taking my time until he could fill me completely; he felt amazing even with the thin membrane separating us, and we both grunted at the movements. "Do you like it?"

"God, yes, B- baby," he said, strain evident in his voice and on his face.

I leaned toward that glorious face, all sharp angles in shadow, putting one hand on the mattress, running the palm of the other up his cheek. He turned to kiss the skin there, his lips burning me though they were losing their warmth.

"Put your hands on my hips so you can feel me move," I ordered him.

"Believe me, I can feel you move," he said hoarsely, but he snaked his hands under the blanket and around my cheeks, spreading them, kneading the flesh with the pads of his fingers just strongly enough, and it was divine.

"Oh, that feels really good, your hands on my ass," I purred, leaning closer so my breath would spread on his skin of his collarbones. "And you know what else feels really good? Your cock. Your cock inside me. It's moving right where I need it, to make me pulse all around you. And I'm really wet. I'm wet from your hands on me outside, and I'm wet … uhhh -" I had to catch my breath after a particularly strong wave of sensation "— wet from your cock in me right now, and my clit pressing against your skin. Your skin feels … Oh, fuck…"

Yoga may have made me more limber, but apparently it hadn't improved my brain function, because I soon found myself unable to speak coherently. "You … God…I can't …" I babbled as I sat up so I could rock on him more forcefully, our game not allowing him to fly me over him as I liked so much. But being slower allowed me to scrape my teeth against his nipples, causing him to groan and grab my ass hard. The pressure of his hands sent a jolt through me, which made me convulse and whimper above him. He turned his face into a pillow next to his head, muffling his decidedly un-human roar as he came.

Our pants were loud in the dark room as we stared at each other.

"Wow," Tony mumbled.

"My compliments to your woman friend," I murmured wickedly. "She trained you well."

"Ummm," he said, seemingly at a loss for how to respond. I could feel him shaking with silent laughter under me, and I had to suppress my own giggles, because there was really no way he could reply to that without getting himself into some serious shit.

"Ummm," he said again. "Do you mind lifting up? I have to take care of ... you know…"

I didn't know, but raised my hips anyway, understanding his intent only when his hand glided under me to hold on to the condom as I shifted off him. He rolled away and walked into the bathroom, and I heard a whoosh of water. That might have been the first time ever a vampire needed to flush something, I thought.

I was surprised at how messy I was, so as he came back, I slid out myself to go clean up. When I returned, Edward was prone under the blankets, his arms splayed out inconveniently, the bedclothes lifting and lowering with his breaths. I looked down at him in confusion.

"Edward?" I said. "Are you all right?"

I heard a soft wheezing in response.

"Edward?" I leaned down to hear better.

Hah. He was _snoring_, and being a bed hog, and doing it quite believably. I climbed into the sheets and rudely pushed his arm away with enough force that a human would have to move, and snuggled up against him.

"That's the most musical snore I've ever heard," I gave him my critique. "Do men really do that? Just roll over and fall asleep?"

Edward gave up the pretense and turned to face me. "So I gather," he said, grinning smugly. "There's a hormone, prolactin, from orgasm that makes them sleepy."

"So humans usually do it once and go to sleep?"

"Usually after the relationship has matured a bit," he answered. "And in Tony's case, I would imagine that after a day of skiing, a few glasses of wine, the hot tub, and a gorgeous woman riding him to heaven, he would pass out immediately." His tone grew wistful. "Humans seem to derive great pleasure in drifting off to sleep together after lovemaking. … I'd love to go to sleep curled up with you."

"I don't love it," I said promptly. "I love waking up and you're there, but at night I get resentful. I'm glad you don't make prolactin. The result sounds … unsatisfying."

"For a vampire, but not a human," he said, then he made a frustrated noise as I stared at him. "Which is not something that I ever intended to say to you."

"So we _do_ have an abnormal amount of sex," I said with a smile. While it was true that I didn't fantasize about what it would like to be with a human, I did wonder how we compared to human couples. And vampire ones.

"Some of my vampire appetite seems to have rubbed off you –"

"I can't believe you said that!" I said, shoving at his shoulder in mock indignation. "You really are 17 sometimes."

"I am always."

His words reminded me of my conversation with Rosalie. "So you really, truly don't change?" I asked.

He sighed. "We can learn new things, but the sort of wisdom that allows one to control emotions and impulses ... or rather, not to have them in the first place … that's what we don't have. Carlisle must have been an extraordinarily self-possessed young man, well on the way to sainthood."

"I just don't get it," I said, sitting up, because I guessed this was going to be a long post-coital conversation, one longer than sleepy humans would have. Edward sat up as well, and we adjusted so that we were facing each other, my legs draped over his thighs, blankets cocooning us. "If you all are so unchangeable, why aren't you always listening to, I don't know, ragtime or Bessie Smith? And Carlisle to those madrigals of his youth?"

"Carlisle does listen to those madrigals. Quite a lot. _Chain me, chain me, O most fair_," he sang suddenly and angelically. He pulled free the part of my chignon that hadn't already come loose from our exertions. _"Chain me to thee with that hair." _

I gaped at him a moment. His singing was an astonishing mix of transcendent and sensual. "Okay," I finally got out, "but Carlisle's also a 370-year-old with an iPod filled with music by every indie band in the Northwest. Charlie's barely in his 40s, and he listens only to songs from his high school years."

Edward nodded. "It's an advantage to being changed young - our love of novelty never wears off. Someday you'll meet vampires who are still in the frock coats or knee breeches they wore when they were bitten. But we weren't old enough to be set in our ways when we were changed. It's not hard for me to deal with new technology, say. I still want to see what's going to happen next; I still feel I have so much to learn."

He gazed at me a moment. "Especially now. I think you'll feel the same. The more you learn, the more you realize that there's so much you don't know. There are so many languages I don't know, so many compositions I've never heard, so many that have yet to be written, so many permutations in the way the economy works. For Carlisle, so much of the human body is still a mystery. The vampire body even more so. Alice finds something novel in every fashion season. For reasons I cannot fathom Emmett finds humans playing sports endlessly fascinating. Rosalie is absorbed by mechanics and physics. Jasper and Esme spend a lot of time keeping up on the law to deal with our property and keep our identities safe. I've certainly been lonely, but not bored - well, at least not outside of high school. And even parts of my last two years of high school were rather exciting." He winked at me.

"Of course, the obverse of that is a certain lack of emotional maturity, as you've seen."

"When?"

"With my reactions to your spending time with Jacob."

"But you were right about my going to La Push," I observed.

Moonlight was streaming through the bedroom window now, making his grimace more visible to me. "No, you may not have been right about the prudence of going there, but I was definitely wrong in how I tried to stop you," he said. "Our emotions can be moderated by experience, but not by age. And there's probably no one as intolerant and headstrong as a teenager."

I looked at him skeptically, and he smiled. "You're an exception to all this of course, my middle-aged wife," he said gently.

"Thirty-five isn't considered middle-age anymore, old-timer."

"True. But every moment we can gain in maturity is precious. I'm glad you decided to spend some time in college."

I stared at him significantly for a moment, and he looked at me curiously. "What?" he finally asked.

"I'm waiting for the part where you tell me that I could spend _much more _time in college."

He looked guilty. "I can't say it. I'm counting the seconds till you change. Besides, if you get much wiser, you might decide you don't want to be with a boy like me." He said this as if he were joking, but I could detect the worry that underlay his light tone. It was something he had considered possible –after all, he had asked me when we came back from Italy if I had moved on, and he had told me that he would let me go if I somehow outgrew him.

"Am I killing you?" I blurted out.

"What?" he asked again.

"Rosalie suggested that the waiting is hard on you."

"Rosalie can go mind her own business –" he said, his voice suddenly harsh.

"_Edward._ I told you about my tremors –"

"Finally."

"Yes, finally, I admit it. Now you can tell me what's going on with you."

He paused a long while, absent-mindedly stroking my thigh, then looked at me, choosing his words carefully. "My need for you is not sated by time, it only grows, and it's ... difficult to keep it in check, to let you sleep, to eat, to ski with your friends ... You looked terrific today, by the way."

"How did you see me?"

"I saw your last run from the Jeep. The fuchsia helped me pick you out," he said to tease me.

I grimaced this time. "Stop distracting me. How difficult is this for you?"

"Enough that I've talked about it with Carlisle," he said quietly. "I worry that I am demanding too much of you. It's different from before, when I feared I would hurt you out of carelessness. When you change, we could spend the next 10 years straight making love, and it wouldn't be enough."

My heart twisted to hear him. "Let's go back to Forks tomorrow," I said, grabbing his hands. "Or let's have Carlisle meet us in Denali. The waiting isn't worth it. I won't have you suffer just for –"

"Shhh, baby, don't worry," he said soothingly, freeing his hands and putting them on my face to comfort me. "I've waited nine decades. I can wait two weeks more. You've told me what you want, and that's what I want you to have. Say goodbye to Charlie, maybe Jacob, and start a new life with the peace of mind from having done so."

"You sound like Rosalie," I told him.

"Then she's right about something."

We were silent for a while then. He ran his fingers through my freed hair, sending pleasant shivers along my scalp.

"So how long have you been planning to become a pick-up artist?" I asked eventually.

He chuckled. "Since I asked you if you wondered what it would be like with a human partner, but I called the real estate office just this morning. My only requirements were that someone come in and turn on the hot tub and the blankets, and the people there were happy to oblige once I gave them a credit card number." Yeah, reciting those numbers in his silken persuasive voice would be enough to get them to do anything.

"Did they stash the condoms in the bedside table for you, too?"

He laughed. "Uh, no. I took care of that while you were ... undressing." He seemed to get distracted at the thought, even though I was there right in front of him. I wriggled a little closer to him, and his eyes shot up to my face.

"How did it feel?"

"Wonderful," he said, as if surprised I would ask.

"No, I mean, how was the condom?"

"Oh. It was ... odd. It shredded."

He said this with a straight face, but I started giggling.

"Trojan versus Vampire. Who is the 'Mightiest Warrior'?" I intoned. I knew Jasper watched that ridiculous show on that cable channel for boys; he found it fascinating.

"Deadliest," Edward corrected me, sounding disgusted. "But the adjective still works. Never wearing one of those again would be too soon."

"If it mattered, we'd be so freaked out right now," I mused.

"Yes. I've heard about that many times, though less in recent years."

"So I guess the resort employees didn't sneak lube into the hot tub either?"

"No."

_Strange_. "So how did you get me so –"

"I didn't."

"Oh."

"Perhaps I should say, I guess I did, but it wasn't with lube. Sometimes that seems to work out for women, sometimes it doesn't. And yes, Marie seemed very ... comfortable in the water. " Edward paused. "Do you think Marie will pay us another visit sometime?"

I couldn't help but snicker. "What, you want a threesome with my dirty-talking doppelganger?"

His eyes lost focus for a moment, then snapped back to mine. "Hmmm, I think I can handle only one Bella at a time," he said. I smirked at him, and he smiled softly. "You are all I ever need. It's a vampire thing."

I leaned toward him so I could reach his lips. "You're all I ever need. It's a human thing," I said, and kissed him. "And now, although you made an excellent human, I want my vampire husband back."

I scooted between his legs until my hips were cradled in his lap and my calves were around his back. His arms wrapped around me for support. "So, what do you want to do … after?" I asked, exulting silently to feel him twitch against my abdomen.

"After? After you're over everything?" His voice rasped in my ear, and he pressed my hips closer, moving me wetly against him. "Oh, God, Bella. I want to kiss you – really kiss you, with tongue, soul kisses, sloppy kisses – for a year."

It was so simple, so chaste, yet his tone was filled with so much desire that I had to moan. "That's breathtakingly romantic," I murmured.

"I also want to fuck your brains out," he ground out, and I had to moan again. He cupped my ass and lifted me high enough so I could slide down around his erection. I clutched his shoulders and he buried his face between my breasts, inhaling hungrily, moving me as only a vampire could.

"Is this okay?" he asked, his voice muffled.

"God, yes …. Oh, just there, no further," I said, as he lowered me a little too much. He moved me up and down again. "That's perfect. … Baby, tell me what you want us to do, what you want to do with me."

He pulled his head back from my cleavage and stared at me. "I want to fuck on a glacier," he said hoarsely. "I want to fuck you against a tree. I want to fuck anytime we want to fuck and not have to wait for me to be able to touch you. I want you to chase me through the woods after a hunt and pin me to the ground and fuck me."

I could barely breathe: since our wedding he had shown himself to be passionate and seductive and profane, but the raw need in his voice – his need for _me_ and only me, whether it was the product of fate or science - was stunning. I whimpered as he moved me, and his burning eyes prompted my own litany. "I want to fuck in the snow," I groaned. "I want to fuck in the wet grass. I want to fuck all through the night and the next day because we can. I want you to chase me through the woods and tear off my clothes and fuck me."

His body shuddered under my hands. "I want all that too," he said.

He lifted me up and down even faster, and I could feel the flush of climax shoot across my skin. "But most of all, what I want is you," he whispered, and finally I knew it. I knew it better than my own name.

* * *

Finals week left my stomach in knots. My respectable performance in my classes over the quarter had eased some of my fears that I wasn't smart enough to be at Dartmouth - admittedly, I had an inordinate amount of help, with a personal shopper, enough money that I didn't need a work-study job, a study partner who could explain anything to me, the luxury of spending my nights drunk on love instead of on cheap beer and schnapps - but I wanted so much to do well, to justify Edward's faith in me, and to prove to myself that for a human, I was reasonably intelligent … even if I knew better than anyone on campus just how irrelevant my grades would be to my future. But each time I sat down for my three-hour stretch with an exam booklet, I felt on the verge of throwing up.

At least Lonnie had managed to tear herself away from Tanya long enough to take the psych final, and when she plopped down next to me in the classroom, she exuded the contentment of the freshly ravished. She was glowing with confidence.

Afterward I had told her of Edward and my plans for the next quarter. I knew that we would never see each other again, but she didn't, and her eagerness to return to Tanya was obvious. I felt a pang that this was goodbye, but I could empathize with her. I had my own vampire waiting for me, after all.

My art history exam on Thursday afternoon was my last of the quarter, and I wandered into the kitchen for breakfast that morning without much enthusiasm. It didn't help that my period was coming and for the first time in my life, I felt bloated and sore; Edward had had to be more careful than usual with me when I woke up, understanding without explanation when I said my breasts were tender. He could read a calendar too.

I could manage cereal, I decided, and pulled out a bowl and spoon, the Cheerios box and -

"Is this milk sour?" I asked.

Edward appeared at my side and took a sniff. "No, it has the same revolting smell it usually has," he said.

He kissed me and returned to the study to clear it out for our departure on Friday. I sat down with my Cheerios, feeling uncomfortable even in my yoga pants. Age, I supposed. At least this was the last menstrual cycle I'd torture Edward with ...

Edward must have been wrong, because, God, this milk tasted disgusting, I thought suddenly after I took a bite, shoving myself away from the table. I instinctively headed to the kitchen sink.

"Bella, what's wrong?" Edward said a second later, pulling my hair back as I retched.

"What's wrong is that milk," I moaned. As I rinsed out the sink and my mouth, he took the bottle of milk from the refrigerator. He drank a gulp before I could protest.

He put the bottle on the counter with uncharacteristic sluggishness and stared at me. "It's fine. You're not," he said. He stepped over to me and put his hand on my sternum.

"What?"

"Something's wrong with your heartbeat."

"What? Oh, _shit_," I groaned as I pulled away to lean over the sink again.

"What's wrong with my heartbeat?" I asked when I came back up, unable to avoid noticing my pasty, distorted face in the chrome faucet. I really needed to brush my teeth, but I contented myself with another swig of water.

"You should have your period today," he said, not answering my question. He was leaning against the counter as if he actually needed the support, the edge of the steel yielding under his fingers.

"What?" I asked, my brain not caught up to his.

"You're vomiting, you have two heartbeats and _you're not going to have your period today_."

Three pieces of advice Renee used to give me suddenly ran through my head. Like her, I had ignored them all:

_Don't marry before you finish college._

_Don't keep your money in a joint account._

"Don't trust a man who says he's sterile," I murmured in a daze.

He stared at me. "I never said I was sterile," he said, and he looked horrified. On his face I could see the years of medical school reading about difficult pregnancies and ghastly births, his mother's suffering over her miscarriages.

"Which means something has changed about you. The venom. You absorbed my venom and it changed you somehow. It gave you the tremors. It has to be." He ran his hands frantically over my arms, my face, probing my skin. He shook his head. "But why doesn't it happen to Tanya's partners?"

"Carlisle said I looked paler than before," I remembered. "And I haven't tripped in a while. And I skied." _And Tanya said I was beautiful. _

"That's why the legend among the Ticuna persisted … because it was fucking true, and I didn't see it in my arrogance, in my confidence in my own medical training," he muttered, and I remembered how Kaure's story on Isle Esme had disturbed him.

"Edward, what did Kaure say, the part you didn't tell me?" I asked softly.

"The legend says the mothers die," he said bleakly. Oh. That Albanian waitress in the diner had said I was going to die too.

"How?"

"The demon bites but doesn't kill. The woman is entranced and grows pale, and returns every month to the jungle where the demon is waiting for her. He takes her again and again until she falls pregnant. The woman dies when the demon child is born, and the demon takes his spawn and leaves the corpse behind."

As he recited this in a monotone, the scar on my arm that James had inflicted began to throb. Edward's eyes followed as my other hand pushed at the scar, and he dropped to his knees in front of me.

"I thought I had saved you in Phoenix, and I didn't," he said with fury. "Bella, I won't lose you again. I can't. Let me," he gasped in air, "let me change you now, damn the circumstances, they don't matter. Let me save you _now_."

I dropped to my knees as well, noticing now how fluidly I could move, and touched the fist clenched at his hip. He flinched as if I had burned him.

"Carlisle can help us figure out what to do," I said, surprised by my calm. Something fluttered in my abdomen, and I pulled his hand to me and placed it above the movement. His face twisted, but I persisted. "We will figure it out when we have all the information we need. Let's go home and decide what to do together. Please, promise me that."

All the phones in the house rang then, but we ignored them as he said, "Together, we'll decide." He took in a shaky breath. "But you … you are my first concern. You have to know that."

I nodded, and I made my own promise to him: "I do know that. And when it's all over, we'll be together then too."

* * *

A/N:

_Remember, there is an epilogue! _

_"Getting Warmer" has been nominated (thanks!) in the Vampies, for best overall and best romance. Voting runs till Feb. 28. Here's the list of nominees: _http:/twificpics . com / vampawards /?page_id=294

_Yeah, I know that all of you who read this because there was no demon spawn hate me right now. But one of my goals in this story – besides writing lots of smut – was to get the characters to a place where Rosalie wouldn't see Bella as a walking uterus, Edward wouldn't be so anti-choice, and Bella could say what she needs while acknowledging Edward's own needs and fears (because really, they are all big jerks in the pregnancy part of BD). Would it help if I said that the word "Renesmee" won't appear in the next installment?_

_Thanks to ltlerthqak, author of the lovely "Giofógach." for sending some readers my way. You can find her (hard to spell if you're not fluent in Irish) story on my favorites list. _

_Music: Rosalie is listening to "Infra 5" by Max Richter. Edward sings Francis Pilkington's "Have I Found Her." And "Careless Love" is about being knocked up, though Bessie Smith's version is pretty polite about it. _


	17. Epilogue: On Time

_Disclaimer: I own neither "Twilight" nor, more sadly, "Arcadia," because then I'd own a Pulitzer._

_Mr. Price says this has to be a chapter because it's too long to be an epilogue, but let's just ignore him, shall we?_

* * *

Epilogue: On Time

**Valentine** Well, it _is_ odd. Heat goes to cold. It's a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It'll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature …

**Septimus** So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me.

**Valentine** The heat goes into the mix … And everything is mixing the same way, all the time, irreversibly … till there's no time left. That's what time means.

- From Act II of "Arcadia," by Tom Stoppard

* * *

_From the September/October issue of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine_

**Deaths **

… (College, '52), Feb. 28, in Saddle River, N.J.

William Livy Finch (College, '59), March 3, in Katonah, N.Y.

David Saltonstall Hockington (DSM, '62), Feb. 12, in Brookline, Mass.

Bella S. Cullen (College freshman) …

* * *

The summer I was 13, Renee either forgot or didn't have enough money to enroll me in camp. My few friends were away making lanyards and working on their serves, Renee was in class all day at Arizona State for her teaching certificate, and I spent the scorching daylight hours watching soap operas. On those shows, every pregnancy was a difficult and oddly truncated one: the mother-to-be would have a rare genetic disorder, be forced to go on bed rest, and flatline during labor, which would inevitably start in the middle of the woods far from a hospital. Renee had told me about my own textbook birth plenty of times, so the scriptwriters' dependence on pregnancies for drama always made me roll my eyes.

I didn't know then that someday I'd have a soap opera pregnancy.

At least I avoided that other soap opera cliché: I didn't get knocked up the first time I had sex.

* * *

"Foutra 'pon me!"

I opened a bleary eye to see Carlisle, his blond hair a halo in the moonlight, peering at me through the open door of the rental sedan's back seat. The damp air was heavy with the scent of the cedars surrounding the Forks house.

"Is that some Shakespearean epithet?" I asked groggily, as he reached in a hand to help me out.

"More or less," he said. He steadied me automatically as my shoes slid on the gravel of the drive. "My apologies. Edward had told me, of course, but hearing the heartbeat ... it's remarkable. "

"'Remarkable' isn't quite the word I'd use," Edward said, climbing out behind me. There was an edge of despair in his voice that made my chest ache.

Carlisle ignored him. "May I?" he asked as he made to put a palm on my abdomen under the open zipper of my jacket.

"Carlisle! Let the poor girl get into the house before you subject her to an examination," Esme said, next to him now after embracing our driver, Rosalie. My mother-in-law pulled me into her arms for a cold hug. "Come in," she went on. "You must be exhausted."

I wasn't, now that we were here, but I should have been. The hours after our discovery were a whirl of packing, incredulous telephone conversations with the doctor who'd seen everything, unenlightening ones with the psychic who couldn't see anything, and one session of sweet-talking an airline reservations clerk into three seats together on the only nonstop remaining that day from Logan to Sea-Tac.

Or rather, that's what Edward did. I spent the time heaving and composing another mendacious email to Charlie and Renee, informing them that a language program in Moscow that Edward needed for his fellowship had a sudden opening, and we were heading east right away. Instead, we headed west, and the Alaska Airlines flight attendant plied me with saltines and ginger ale that my stomach promptly sent back up as Rosalie and Edward hovered near the lav door. Still, by the end of the six-hour flight, my yoga pants were uncomfortably tight.

When I stepped into the living room, I smiled at the faintly sweet smell in the air, the vibrant colors of the paintings, the piano on its platform, the black glass of the window walls, the pristine white sofas and chairs. It was so welcoming and familiar.

But the three doctors and I were headed upstairs, to Carlisle's office. The first thing I noticed was that there seemed to be a lot more medical equipment than before, including a sort of computer monitor on wheels, its lights on, next to the sheet-covered chesterfield.

"Ultrasound," Carlisle told me, the only one in the room who didn't recognize the machine. "Let's see if we can get a picture." While I lay down on the sofa, Esme came in with a bowl of steaming water.

"Thank you," Carlisle said, kissing her before reaching into the bowl and taking out a dollop of gel. "Pull your shirt up above your abdomen, please," he said to me. He assessed my torso a moment, and I looked down at it. It had a slight, but definite, bulge.

"That's not 20 weeks," Edward murmured, apparently answering Carlisle's thought.

"She's very young," Rosalie noted.

"That she is," Edward said bleakly. He moved to kneel by my legs and touched the black fabric on my shin. "This shouldn't take long."

He was more right than he knew. After Carlisle smeared the warm gel on my belly and placed the ultrasound wand there, five pairs of eyes stared at the monitor only to see … nothing. There was a pained groan, a couple of hisses and another "Foutra 'pon me!" After a few minutes of futile adjustments, Carlisle switched off the machine in frustration, and sent everyone else downstairs so he could take some samples from me.

"Carlisle," I said as quietly as I could as he capped a vial of my blood, "can _I _hear the heartbeat?"

He didn't reply, simply taking a stethoscope from a cabinet and bringing it to me on the sofa.

"It's so fast!" I said in surprise once I had the diaphragm of the stethoscope properly positioned. "Is that normal?"

"Fetal heartbeats are much faster than those of adults," Carlisle told me. "The beats per minute slow down as the pregnancy progresses."

"So that's good, isn't it?"

"I hope so," he said. His grimace seemed involuntary.

As I made my way downstairs, I was hit by a surge of dizziness that forced me to clutch the banister. Edward was holding me in a second. "_That's_ 20 weeks," he said, helping me navigate the steps.

"What's 20 weeks?" I was finally able to ask as I sat next to Edward on one of Esme's white sofas. She had put out a tray with water and milk on the coffee table. Ugh. I grabbed the water.

"You have some signs of a 20-week pregnancy," Edward explained. "Movement you can feel, a heartbeat you could hear with a stethoscope, dizziness."

"But the nausea isn't usual," Rosalie added from the armchair to my right. "And you're small."

"You guys are like a walking version of 'What to Expect When You're –' _What_? I could be five months pregnant?" I asked in disbelief, looking down at my belly again. I touched it. It felt as if a stone was inside. "But I had my period on October –"

"Oh, we know," Rosalie interrupted me, rolling her eyes at my obliviousness. "Apparently, your little tenant is moving fast."

"Indeed," said Carlisle, who had come downstairs without my noticing. "I'll be able to get the hormonal results tomorrow, and that might help us date the gestation," he went on as he sat down next to Esme. She nestled into him, and he pulled her even closer. "You didn't smell pregnant in Paris. So if you're the equivalent of 20 weeks, you must have gone through tremendous hormonal fluctuations in an extremely short period. Which means – well, there's never a good way to ask this, but have you felt ... moody recently?"

"Oh, is this like asking a woman if she has PMS?" I couldn't help snorting a little. "To be honest, I've been incredibly tense this last week because of finals, so I don't really know. Before that, I don't think so."

"You were only a little bitchy when I kidnapped you," Rosalie agreed.

"Thanks, Rosalie." I crinkled my nose at her.

Edward spoke then, not caring about Rosalie's opinion of my moods. "Carlisle, what should we do?" he asked impatiently.

My father-in-law sighed heavily. "According to Kaure's account, and the other stories that I've found in my admittedly brief research, this pregnancy puts Bella in grave danger, and Alice can't see your future…" he trailed off, then spoke to me. "We simply don't know enough, and with the ultrasound useless, we can't even safely undertake an amniocentesis to obtain genetic information. As your doctor, I would have to advise you to terminate."

Edward started to speak, but Rosalie cut him off. "If I were in your place, I would have it," she said bluntly.

I nodded. I expected that. But Rosalie wasn't finished. "However, as your sister, as_ Edward's _sister, I think the risk is too great," she said. Her gaze was fierce, and I knew that she was warning me again of what would happen if I screwed things up.

"It's not too late for a regular dilation and extraction," Edward said immediately, rushing his words as if he was afraid that Esme was going to weigh in too.

Carlisle shook his head. "Have you felt Bella's uterus? Or rather, I should say, based on the ultrasound, the impenetrable amniotic sac? How can that be delivered or extracted safely? It would have to be a hysterotomy." His eyes darted to me. "An abdominal incision," he explained.

I considered this a moment. "Like a C-section?" I asked.

"Yes."

I was pretty sure that C-sections were hard to come by in the middle of the jungle, or the mountains of Albania for that matter. "The women in Kaure's story obviously didn't have a C-section," I noted. "So how would it get out when the time came?"

Carlisle winced, and Edward erupted. "No!" he roared, launching himself from the sofa and standing in front of me as if to protect me from Carlisle's thoughts.

"The legends say it tears its way out," Carlisle said. Esme looked shocked next to him.

I grabbed Edward's hand in hopes of calming him, my need to soothe him chasing away my mental images of "Alien" and hyena births. "No," I told him, my voice tight. "That's not going to happen." I looked at Carlisle. "You can perform a C-section on me?"

"Yes," he said.

"Let's do it now," Edward said, turning to me, calmer but still standing. I tugged ineffectually at his hand.

"But," I said, "if I'm going to have to have a C-section no matter what, why don't we want until –" I paused, not sure what name to give to whatever was growing inside me, and pointed at my belly instead "-this is, uh, what is the word for living outside –"

"Viable?" Rosalie suggested.

"Exactly," I said. "If I'm really 20 weeks, is it viable now?"

"The odds would be against a human at that gestational age," Carlisle said. "They increase greatly once the pregnancy reaches the third trimester—"

"For a _human_," Edward said. "This isn't human. It's a monster."

I hauled myself to my feet, pulling myself up with Edward's immobile hand, and stared into the dull gold of his eyes. He looked as haggard as I felt right now. "It has to be part me and part you," I said softly. "I refuse to believe that something from you, from _us_, would be something monstrous, something that we can't figure out, that you and Carlisle and Rosalie can't figure out."

"I could kill you without thinking, and this –'' he touched the stone in my torso gingerly "— this isn't thinking … I can't lose you," he said, his voice emphatic. His hand squeezed mine painfully.

"Easy, baby," I murmured, and he flinched and loosened his grip.

"You won't lose me," I said. I put my free hand on his cheek. "You all have my permission –" I turned to look at the other three members of my family "— if something goes wrong, to do whatever you need to do, to change me immediately." I looked back at Edward.

"You promise?" he said.

"I promise," I said, and I felt the tension in his jaw ease under my hand.

The silence that fell then was finally broken by Esme. "It is always your choice, Bella," she said gently, and I smiled gratefully at her. Ever the peacemaker, she went on, "The question now is, do we need to talk with the wolves?"

"I don't want there to be a problem with the treaty," I said. "Shouldn't we go to Alaska?"

"For your safety," Carlisle answered me, "we need to stay here. I won't have the access to medical supplies there that I have as a hospital employee."

"But – " I protested.

"We can negotiate," Esme said. "The wolves have to see the need for an exception."

"Then I want to tell Jacob first," I said.

"But Sam Uley is the … top dog," Rosalie objected, disgust in her voice. "Jacob can't decide anything."

"He deserves to hear it first, and to have a private reaction, one that isn't immediately shared by all the wolves," I said, remembering the unfortunate way Jacob had learned about my engagement. "If he'll take my call..." I glanced at Edward.

He looked as if he just bitten into something rotten, but he nodded. "Jacob does deserve to know first," he said.

We talked then about how far along I was as a non-human, beyond the obvious fact that I had an receptive ovum, about the alterations I had noticed in myself, trying to tease out what changes could be attributed to pregnancy and which to ... change. The timeline of the tremors put them squarely in the transformational category, and Carlisle shook his head in self-reproach at not thinking of that possibility when we had talked in France.

Politely, no one asked about my libido, despite the wealth of information the answer would provide.

Instead, the topic of conversation moved on to timing and technique, and I was pleased to see that Edward, with my promise in mind, was able to discuss the pregnancy more or less dispassionately, though he pushed for an even earlier delivery than Carlisle and Rosalie.

Eventually, though a wave of exhaustion hit me; it felt like months since I had upchucked my Cheerios. I didn't object when Edward carried to the third floor – our cottage in the forest was out of bounds for me now - and set me down on the bed he'd bought for me …oh, God, was it really less than a year ago?

"Come take a shower with me?" I asked as he sank down next to me.

Edward hesitated, knowing what I was really asking. "Do you think that's a good idea?"

"We'll both feel better. And it'll take my mind off the nausea," I said.

He suddenly dropped his head in his hands, and his shoulders shook. Crap, crap, crap, I thought in dismay … and anger - hadn't we come too far for him to return to the self-loathing early days of our honeymoon? If he was going to refuse to touch me because he blamed himself for my being in danger, I was going to be seriously irritated.

"Edward?"

He finally looked up, and I realized he was holding in laughter. "You certainly know how to massage a man's ego," he finally said in a mock lament. "I'm better than vomiting?"

"Sorry." But I wasn't, because I had made him laugh.

He smiled, and grasped my hand. "Come, then. After all, I won't have many opportunities to take advantage of a lady in a delicate condition. At least," he added meaningfully, "I shouldn't have."

I chose to ignore the double, darker meaning of his words, and we soon made each other forget it. At least for a little while.

* * *

_Silence._

"Hello, Jacob?"

_Silence._

"It's, uh, Bella."

_Silence._

"I know." _Pause._ "Charlie said you were in Russia? Is that supposed to be like a code word now?"

"No, I'm here in Forks, at Carlisle and Esme's house. But Charlie can't know."

"No, _you_ can't be in Forks because -"

"Jacob, I'm not - look, nothing's happened that you, well, the pack, can object to. But something _has _happened and ... I need to talk to you."

_Silence._

* * *

It took a few days before Jacob showed up, and by then things had changed substantially. The rest of the siblings had arrived from New Hampshire, having finished their finals and closed up Fenwick as quickly as possible. Tanya came, too, out of concern for me. And it was a good thing for us that she did – she had been so scarred by her mother's death over the illicit immortal child that perhaps only seeing the pregnancy progress would have convinced her that we had done nothing that would blatantly violate the rules. Still, we were doubtless a little illegal by the Volturi's lights … and I was more than a little pregnant.

For my samples had indeed indicated the hormone levels of an advanced pregnancy, and the stone in my belly was becoming a lively boulder, kicking me hard enough that I once would have had bruises and forcing me into Emmett's gigantic green Dartmouth sweatshirt. Alice looked appalled, and immediately sewed up some cute maternity dresses, but I found Em's sweatshirt too cozy to give up. I just wasn't going to be an elegant hugely pregnant woman.

And every day, the creature in my womb solidified in my mind into a child.

I called my parents on the appropriate day and marveled with them over how Russians didn't celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25. My mother was loud in her disappointment that I wouldn't see her over the holiday break, and the pang in my gut told me that my father was quietly poignant in his. I was so grateful for Sue.

As for our own Christmas, the best gift was that we made a crucial discovery.

The doctors had grown increasingly worried by my inability to keep anything down, and I was looking hollow-eyed and sharp-boned enough that Carlisle considered putting me on a drip. Carlisle had asked me finally, when I was sitting at the dining room table looking down disconsolately at toast and applesauce, what foods had been appealed to me recently.

"I haven't had a great appetite since Paris," I said, "but I figured that was because I'd been spoiled by all the French cuisine."

"Rare steak," Edward said, remembering for me, "and the spinach omelet I made when you went skiing."

"Oh, yeah, that was really good," I agreed.

"So, you've been craving protein and iron," Carlisle mused. "Anemia is common in pregnancy. Maybe -"

Emmett walked in then and huffed loudly. "Maybe all you doctors are idiots," he said with exasperation as Rosalie stared at him, astonished. "Rare steak is _bloody_. Blood for the incipient vampires. Blood, blood, blood, blood," he went on, before transitioning into "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam …"

And thus blood became my shamefully delicious beverage of choice.

Sorry, Jasper.

Jacob arrived in the afternoon, after I'd had a, um, reviving drink, and taken a long walk with Esme along the river as she recalled what she could from her own pregnancy – jeez, the practices of the time were bizarre, what with the behaviorists recommending that mothers never touch their babies.

Since I no longer looked about to keel over, Edward had been comfortable enough to go for a quick hunt with Jasper, Emmett and Tanya, who had given him first dibs on everything so he could return home as soon as possible. So I was now lazing on the sofa, partly wrapped in a blanket and reclining between Edward's legs, because being in contact with Edward made everything feel better, and playing Scrabble with Esme and Rosalie. As usual Edward and Alice were prohibited from playing, but everyone pretended not to notice when Edward rearranged the tiles on the Scrabble tray on my belly so that CAKE GAP became a lucrative PACKAGE. I snorted.

"It's much more productive," he murmured in my ear.

"Apparently," I said, and made a show of scratching one of the many spectacular stretch marks on my abdomen under Em's sweatshirt. "It doesn't seem fair that adolescent vampire men can reproduce but not vampire women," I said pointedly as I awaited my turn. Rosalie nodded in agreement.

But Alice shuddered theatrically. "I, for one, am glad not to have to spend eternity worrying about birth control. Imagine it, Bella. And what would work?"

Even Rosalie seemed arrested by that observation.

"You have a point," I said, remembering Tony and Marie's adventure with the condom. And then I couldn't resist asking, "Edward, do you think that when we were at the ski house, that was when –"

"Believe me, I've considered it, because that would be just too fitting," he said dryly. "On the other hand, we do have many candidates."

Alice suddenly swore. Edward tensed.

"Jacob's coming," he said. Several minutes later, the Rabbit was grinding up the drive, and Edward slid away to coolly greet Jacob at the door.

My first reaction was joy: it was so good to see him. He looked a little older, maybe even a little taller, dressed in actual clothes almost suitable for winter, jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. It was only when he strode over to me on the sofa to give me a hug that I noticed the odor - he smelled woodsy, like Edward after the hunt, but it was mixed with some unpleasant aroma, like decay and stagnant water. I couldn't help recoiling a bit.

He recoiled too, and looked confused, and that was even before his eyes traveled down to my stomach and widened.

"Damn. It really was a shotgun wedding, like everyone said," he said.

I shot him a dirty look. It wasn't because of the implication that Edward had been forced to marry me, but because of the slight to Edward's virtue – while I would have happily discarded my virginity many times before the wedding, the idea that Jake thought Edward hadn't held true to his particular moral code irritated me.

"That is both sexist and wrong," I told him coldly, not bothering with social niceties.

Rosalie sniffed. "Funny how often those two things go together," she said.

"Sexist, I'll give you," Jacob said, shrugging.

He plopped down by my feet, making the sofa shake from the impact. The Scrabble tray slid off my stomach and Edward grabbed it as he folded himself on the floor next to me. "So," Jacob said cheerfully, pointing at my boulder, "how did this happen?"

A gale of feminine vampiric laughter was his answer, and he scowled at Rosalie. "Up yours. You know what I mean," he said, defensive. Edward was gaping at him, and I wondered what the hell Jacob _did_ mean.

He shifted to face me. "I can't imagine that Fangs let you sleep with someone else," he said, tilting his head at Edward, "but what sperm bank would impregnate an unmarried 18-year-old? Did Carlisle, like, sneak it out for you or something? Don't get me wrong, it's great that you decided not to off yourself -"

It was the turn of everybody else in the room to gape now. I tried to speak, but couldn't get any words out.

"Jacob," Edward said loudly.

" - though I don't know how you're going to explain to him that his stepdad's liable to –"

"_Jacob_," Edward said again. "Bella's been pregnant for three weeks. With _my child_."

I was so thrilled to hear Edward say "my child" that it took me a few seconds to notice that Jacob had become immobile, his hands clawed on his lap. The other vampires in the room shifted into almost crouches, fearing the worst, but Jacob finally shook his head, stood up, and swiftly walked out of the room without a word. The front door slammed from the force of his exit.

"He's off to report to Sam," Edward said.

"Oh. That didn't go very well," I said unhappily.

Alice hissed in frustration, but Edward looked pensive. "No, it'll work to our advantage. I think."

"How?"

"He's realizing that he might be over you."

"And that's good?"

"From my perspective, of course, it's ideal," Edward admitted. "But … perhaps that means you'll have your friend back – a friend who can think more rationally about you."

Still, we called Tanya, Emmett and Jasper in from the woods and Carlisle from the hospital in case of trouble. It was dark when Jacob returned a few hours later, after a wolfy drama that Edward was able to narrate to us, with Jacob breaking away from Sam to defend us from an attack and Seth and Leah following. Jacob showed up in cutoffs this time and flopped down on the sofa again, a mixture of weariness and relief on his face.

"You heard, right?" he asked.

I nodded. "I'm so sorry, Jake. But thank you."

"It's good. It'll be good," he mumbled. He surveyed the room of vampires to see Tanya perched beguilingly on a sofa arm. She regarded Jacob more warmly that I would have expected, given her family's history with the Quileute, and he stared openly at her.

He nodded like an automaton as Carlisle made the introductions and Tanya charmingly praised him for standing up for me. I smirked, unsurprised that Tanya could make even a wolf melt. But Jacob did not melt. Instead, he blurted out, "You're not her," and Edward inhaled sharply.

"Would you play it back for me?" Edward asked, tapping his temple, and all the conversations in the room stopped.

"The wolves saw Irina," he said a second later.

"Is that her name?" Jacob asked.

"My sister," Tanya said, suddenly kneeling in front of Jacob, who cringed at her closeness. "Tell me."

"Yeah, um, well," Jacob started, "Embry was doing his run along the line a couple of weeks ago, and saw a vamp on the other side. Straight blond hair cut off here –" he brought the blade of his hand along his jaw "—raggedy clothes, but gold eyes, so we didn't get too worried about it. She looked at Embry a minute, then turned away and headed toward this house. You didn't see her?" he asked Carlisle. "It was the day before that huge rainstorm."

"Esme and I were in San Francisco that weekend," Carlisle answered. "And the rain would have washed away her scent."

"Oh, thank God," Alice interrupted from across the room. She was vibrating with excitement. "I can finally see something without damn wolves and chimeras in the way. Irina must have decided to go back to your house, Tanya. I see her there. … Ah, now I see _you_ there."

Tanya had leapt to standing by then, and Edward tossed her a cell phone. She snatched it and took it outside to call home.

"Sam didn't tell you about her?" Jacob asked Carlisle, who shook his head. Jacob shrugged. "Emily's pregnant, so he's been distracted lately."

Jacob straightened his back as if he needed to get down to business. "Returning to pregnancies, once again I ask, how did this happen?" This time he pointed directly at my belly. "Didn't you two know better?"

Carlisle answered him, taking on the responsibility: "I didn't know to warn them. We thought it was something that wasn't possible."

And so we had been on a big tear of speculation. Matching up Kaure's account with my own history, one could theorize that Edward had left behind some particle of James's venom that had been working quietly and somehow painlessly to change my genetic structure enough to make conception possible. Or maybe Edward had drawn it all out, but not before it had effected some mutations that lay quiescent until repeated, err, applications of Edward's venom - rather unflatteringly compared by Carlisle to cells that became cancerous when exposed to something in the environment. Still, since I preferred to be altered by Edward rather than James, I opted for the latter theory.

"In any case," I concluded, "it's probably not something we'll ever know for sure."

Jacob shifted uneasily on the sofa. "So does that mean you're slowly turning into a bloodsucker? Do you like blood?" He asked the last part half-jokingly, but when he saw me wince, he swore.

"That's why you have that awful scent," he complained. "I thought it was just from ... um, hanging out with leeches, but it's _you._ Yours is not as bad as theirs but still -"

"Hey, you don't smell so great yourself," I retorted, then noticed that the vampires in the room were practically falling over with laughter, even Edward, who had ducked his head into his knees.

After Jacob recovered somewhat from the revelation of Carlisle's abuse of his blood-bank privileges, there was a long, convoluted conversation about vampire and shapeshifter chromosome pairs, ligers, tigons, mules ("You realize you're the donkey in that scenario," Emmett stage-whispered to me to annoy Edward) and Neanderthal-homo sapiens relations. I had to ask the rest of them to slow down and explain things to me sometimes, but I could follow the gist of it pretty well. Well enough to nudge Jacob's thigh with my cold foot at one point.

"Hey, that's why you imprint, Jake!" I said.

"Huh?" His eyes were open, but he had apparently zoned out.

"You imprint on someone who is genetically compatible. It's why you guys are so endogamous," I said. Several sets of gold eyes were now trained on me, but Jacob just seemed baffled. "You marry Quileute, or women who are closely related to Quileute."

"We live on a reservation," he objected. "That's who we meet."

"Most marriages among Native Americans are interracial," Jasper pointed out.

"Most don't live on reservations," Jacob shot back.

"That's not the point," I interrupted. "You and I have different chromosome sets: you're 24 pairs and I'm 23."

"Going on 25," Esme reminded me.

"Exactly," I acknowledged, and went on, possibly because I was deranged by an excess of pregnancy hormones, "you and I, Jake, for example, couldn't have kids, unless you have some lupine metamorphosis power I don't know about."

It took me a moment to realize what I had done.

Two men in the room froze, for different reasons. Jacob was realizing that his promises to me that he could give me everything in a human life were lies. And Edward ... Edward was struck both by the reminder that if I'd been with Jacob, I wouldn't be facing possible extinction-by-childbirth and the knowledge that, as frightening as it was, he had created something with me that Jacob couldn't.

Jacob shot up from the sofa, and I was once again afraid that he was going to bolt from the house in a transformational rage. Emmett certainly thought he would. "He's going to fursplode," he whispered excitedly before blurring to stand in front of me as a defensive gesture.

But Jake stopped at the black glass wall and laughed almost hysterically for several moments before collecting himself.

"You were right, Bella," he finally said. "You really would have been stuck with Mike Newton."

The vampires relaxed, and Jacob returned to my side. "You know, I never thought you wanted to have kids," he said, scratching his neck as if the near phasing had made him itchy.

"The idea that I wouldn't have kids didn't bother me," I agreed. "I would have changed without any disappointment that I wouldn't, like Alice. Or Edward, for that matter." Edward nodded next to me; his angst about the impossibility of our having children stemmed from his worries about depriving me of something, not from any yearning to be a father. "It would have been just fine. So becoming pregnant – it's as if someone knocked at my door and said, "You don't know that you want this, but I'm giving you a present.' Or Fate."

Edward made a strangled noise, and I gave him a significant look. "The same Fate that Edward thinks brought us together. And I'm not going to argue with Fate at this point. Besides," I said, rubbing my belly - I could feel an elbow, a heel? under my hand, the baby powerful enough to distend my hardened uterine walls - "I'm looking forward to seeing how little B.J. turns out."

"B.J.?" Jake asked.

"Bella Junior," Edward put in hastily.

"I think it's a girl," I said. I really did, too, but I shared a smile with Edward, because blow jobs, far from being banned as I had threatened, were playing a big role in our sex life since many of our usual activities were off limits: Carlisle had discreetly suggested that I limit my venom exposure since, he postulated, human bodies are more adapted for pregnancy than vampire ones.

"You're not really going to name her Bella Junior," Alice said with petulance, annoyed at not knowing.

"No. I was going to suggest to Edward, since there's no need to memorialize any of you guys –" I twirled my finger around the semi-circle of immortals " - that we name her after Edward's mother and mine. Elizabeth Renee. It has good nicknames, and maybe it won't get dated ..."

"Like my name," Rosalie interjected. "I spent most of the 20th century sounding like someone's Sicilian grandmother. Go with something classic. What about a boy?"

"Charlie for one of the names, I think, right?" I mused, looking at Edward. "But obviously not Edward –"

"_There's_ a classic name nobody wants to use anymore," Edward muttered.

"Nothing too complicated and distinctive," Esme advised as Carlisle nodded emphatically.

"Lots of people name their kids Jacob nowadays," Jacob said blithely. "And you can't get much more classic than Jacob."

Silence greeted this observation, and Edward pinched the bridge of his nose viciously. I ran my fingers through his hair to comfort us both.

"It doesn't matter because I'm having a girl," I declared. "Jake, are you hungry? I could go for a steak right now." The blood was helping me keep down more conventional food as well.

Several vampires stood up in readiness, but Jacob scowled at them. "No offense, but the less vamps that touch my food, the better," he said. He considered me a moment. "Including you."

"No problem," I said, maneuvering myself to my feet. "I'll show you where everything is. Stay," I said to Edward as he made to accompany me. "Jacob and I should talk in fictive privacy, anyway." Edward looked mulish, but agreed after a kiss. Jake made a gagging sound as he waited.

Jake and I prepared our meals separately, making sure the steaks didn't touch each other on the broiler pan. "There's takeout from Port Angeles too," I told him, "from when we were still trying to figure out what I could eat. It hasn't been handled by any of us." He went to rummage in the refrigerator, bringing out a half-dozen containers still in carryout bags. We sat at the kitchen island to eat, and Jacob stared at the curlicues in the heavy silver fork in his fingers for a moment, then smirked as I snapped a linen napkin over my lap.

"I'm a little curious," I said quietly as we cut into our steaks, mine barely cooked. "Why did you wait so long to see me?"

Jacob chewed a bit before answering, "I've had four months of waking up every morning knowing that you're with that cold motherfucker and on the other side of the country, to try to _move on_ like that shitty self-help book Sue dug up, and then you suddenly come back and say you want to tell me something? I wasn't sure that I wanted to deal with your crap again, and you have _a lot_ of crap to deal with."

I flinched. "I know," I said. "Thank you for putting up with me. Though I should point out that you've been a manipulative jackass sometimes."

"You should talk – you're married to a master manipulator," he replied. I didn't bother arguing with him, even if he was completely wrong about Edward.

"Besides, it didn't do me any good, did it?" Jacob went on. "Anyway," he added, almost in embarrassment, "I've been in school, and I've got a lot of work to catch up on."

I squealed in approval, but refrained from getting up to give him a hug. We talked then about how exactly he had spent the last four months, hanging out with his packmates, patrolling the forests until he couldn't stand it any more, before returning to high school. It'd been only a couple of weeks, and the adjustment was difficult – his 25-year-old's body intimidated the sophomores, the girls were alternately fascinated by and scared of him and his reputation as one of Sam's thugs, and the teachers were dismissive because he'd missed so much school.

"I'm really happy you're back in class," I told him.

He gave me a weary look. "That's rich, considering that _you're_ not going back to school, with that kid," he said. "Charlie's never going to see you graduate."

"True," I acknowledged.

"Your dad's going to be broken up, you know. Have you thought about trying to keep in touch? Hide the alien baby?" I narrowed my eyes at Jacob's description of B.J. "Or tell him the truth?"

I had thought about it, and perhaps a few months ago I would have tried, but … "It's not fair of me to put Charlie in danger like that," I said.

"We'd protect him," Jacob promised.

"He can't spend his life behind your patrol lines," I pointed out. "And if he knew – you remember my telling you about Aro in Volterra, about how he can read all of everyone's thoughts? If Aro managed to touch Charlie or one of us, he'd know that Charlie knew. And if Aro found out about B.J…." The idea was terrifying.

"But don't you think that Charlie would want to know?"

"I'm not sure he would." I sighed. "Think about it, Jake - the Cullens have worked really hard at charming Charlie, and he's still uneasy with them, though he'd never admit that the last thing he'd want in the world is to be alone in a room with Edward."

"I can see that. But I'm hard-wired to find Edward creepy," Jacob said, shoveling in a forkful of cold pasta salad.

"Yeah, but you also have weapons to defend yourself against a known predator. Charlie doesn't. And when I change I'm going to be a lot less charming than any Cullen, for quite a while. This life I've chosen isn't without sacrifices, and if it all goes as we hope I'll be luckier than any vampire in existence anyway."

Jacob put his fork down as if it was suddenly too weighty for him and looked at me soberly. "How is 'it' going to go? And when?"

"The day after tomorrow, if not before."

"What?" he spluttered. I was glad he'd finished swallowing.

"Look at me. Based on my fundal height –" I stood up and drew a line from the top of my abdomen to the top of my pubic bone "— I'm already eight months, and B.J. seems to grow the equivalent of half a human month every day. Unfortunately, we have no idea what the normal gestation period or the size for her should be. And the thing Carlisle is most worried about is that I'll go into labor."

"Don't you have to?"

"It's not pretty, from what we're told. And not survivable."

Jacob suddenly looked furious. "You might die tomorrow? Then why are you all so damn cheerful about this?" he snarled. "Your _family_ out there isn't acting like you're on the verge of death."

For yet another time that day, I winced, realizing that what was obvious to us wasn't so obvious, or acceptable, to Jacob. "If we do a C-section, then I'm changed –"

"_Here?_ Then you'd be breaking the treaty."

"We would be," Edward's voice said from the doorway of the kitchen. "And we will."

Jacob spun around on his stool to stare at my husband. "You can't," he said.

"You violated the treaty first," Edward said, answering Jacob's thoughts more than his words.

"You were glad I did."

"Yes," Edward acknowledged. "Wouldn't you be glad if Bella survived … in some form?"

For just a second, Edward's mask of control slipped, and the desperation written on his face was like a punch to my throat. Jacob saw it too, and slumped. Even if he thought Edward was always playing him, he couldn't deny the honesty of the pain there.

"Yes," he whispered, "but I'm not –"

"You _are_," Edward insisted, his voice now saturated with the persuasiveness that over the decades had derailed questioning about missing documents and unexplained absences and unconventional lifestyles and, for a time, lured criminals to their deaths. "Sam knows this, Seth and Leah know this. You have the authority, you have the bloodline, to make an exception for Bella. For your _friend_."

"And even I did survive as a human, or if I die," I said bluntly as Edward stepped to my side, "the Volturi will come here again if I don't go to them as a vampire soon. And you don't want that."

There was silence for a long while.

"We don't," Jacob said finally, and stood up so he towered over Edward and me. He looked sternly at us both. "You leave the minute it's over."

Edward shook his head. "Bella will have to hunt first."

Jacob swore for a full 30 seconds at that before he ground out, "Nowhere near La Push."

"Of course not," Edward and I pledged in unison.

Having had his fill of vampire crap for a while, Jacob left to spell Seth, and Edward and I slipped upstairs after bidding goodbye to Tanya as she headed home. I stretched out on my right side on the bed. The timer had turned on the electric blankets under me, and I sighed as Edward curved his body along my back.

"What a day," I mumbled.

"Good? Bad?"

"Both." I wriggled against him. "We could make it better?"

"We could try," he agreed, drawing the duvet over us. "In a few minutes." He buried his face in my hair for a moment, then pulled it aside. My internal regulator was all messed up - my head was clammy, my feet and hands were cold, B.J. was like a blast furnace in my midsection – and Edward's cool breath on my damp neck sent a shiver through my body that made me press harder against him as he murmured against my hairline. "_Erano i capei castani a l'aura sparsi/__che 'n mille dolci nodi gli avolgea,'' _he whispered_. "E 'l vago lume oltra misura ardea__/ di quei begli occhi –" _

He stopped abruptly, his body stone still. I turned to look at him, and his eyes were closed. "Edward?"

It was a minute before he spoke again.

"B.J. likes how Italian sounds." His voice was strained, as if something was constricting his throat.

"What? You can ... hear her?" I sat up jerkily, but Edward stayed where he was, his eyes fluttering open.

"She likes your voice," he said.

"Holy f—" I started before managing to censor myself. "She's listening to us?"

"Yes," he answered. He suddenly looked happier than I had seen him in weeks. "This changes everything. She's _thinking_, Bella. She's thinking about how not to hurt you."

* * *

Being careful not to hurt someone is a tall order for a nearly born baby with the coiled strength of a vampire in its muscles, even for a thinking one who was able to hold conversations with her father. After I gasped one too many times the next day because of B.J.'s movements. Edward and Rosalie spoke out for immediate delivery, and Carlisle decided that with what we knew about the baby's mental development, B.J. must be safely in the range of viability. He and Edward went upstairs to ready the office while Rosalie and Seth kept me company and Jacob and Leah stood guard in the forest. And that's when the last episode of tremors that I would ever have transformed into contractions.

The French, I've learned, have a phrase for when one wants to stop talking about an unpleasant topic: _laissons tomber_. Let's drop it. Events moved faster than the morphine, and I remember snatches of things: one wolf howling outside, then three; the unorthodox incision; the beautiful infant beneath the gore - and the beautiful infant's bite that sent a gush of venom into my bloodstream; Edward's "I love you" that was the last sound I understood for a long time.

The morphine finally kicked in and kept me immobile for a while, but in the infinity that was two days, the only thing that kept me sane was Edward's skin on mine as he curled around my suffering body on the bed in Carlisle's office. "Be still my beating heart" took on a whole new meaning.

As for the rest, _laissons tomber_.

All that matters was the first non-painful thing I'll remember for eternity with crystal clarity – the look on Edward's face when I was able to open my lids. "Happy New Year, Bella," he whispered to me as I stared into his eyes.

"Edward?" I asked in wonder. I'd never been able to distinguish black in so many shades, onyx and jet and anthracite, and there were points of gold, light and dark, as well …

"It is," he said gently, his voice pitched for my disconcertingly sensitive hearing.

I slowly raised my hand to touch his face. Or rather it felt slow even though but I moved faster than any human could follow. "You aren't cold," I said, also in wonder.

"I am," he corrected me, his lips moving under my fingers. "It's just that we match now. Easy, baby," he said, copying my own human warning as he retreated from the eager pressure of my hand. "Let's go hunt, sweet girl, and then you can meet our son."

"Our _son_?"

"Our astonishing son," he confirmed. "But right now hold very still, because first -"

Because first he kissed me as he promised me he would, as he had never been able to kiss me before. I finally got to first base with my husband.

* * *

If Em had been allowed to organize that betting pool about what or whom I'd attack first, Rosalie would have won. But the deer slaked a secondary thirst and made it possible for me to meet the brown-haired son I never expected, to hold my breath and take him from Seth's arms and gaze into his deep green eyes as my family hovered protectively.

"How did he get your eyes?" I asked Edward.

"I _am_ his father."

"You know that's not what I mean. Shouldn't my brown have been dominant?"

"All my genes are dominant," he said with a smirk before honesty compelled him to admit that it was a matter of luck.

"Even if he does look like his father," Leah commented, "Prius is going to be a lady-killer."

"Prius?" I asked, then paused a millisecond to pinpoint the culprit for the name. "Rosalie!"

"They _are_ both hybrids," she pointed out.

* * *

The wolves were so taken with Prius - um, John Charles - that they didn't push us to leave, despite Jacob's previous insistence. Nonetheless the danger that Charlie would discover that Edward and I were in Forks impelled us to go to Alaska.

Before she returned to Lonnie, Tanya prepared her family for the arrival of Cullens plus two kinds of newborn. Even so, we had a tense moment in front of their gigantic chalet of a house when the newly returned Irina refused to believe that our son wasn't an immortal child; she couldn't accept it until he touched her cheek with his warm hand. After that, she was devoted to him, taking a comfort in his presence that she seemed unable to find with anyone else.

* * *

No matter how many times Jasper told me that I was doing wonderfully for a newborn, I still felt out of control, distracted, prey to impulse, terrified of hurting someone. As the two Cullens most in need of frequent fill-ups, we hunted together often, Jasper keeping me steady as he used to do in yoga class. I think he enjoyed no longer being the least stable member of the family.

But even with Jasper's skills, I couldn't hunt just with him – he and I always went out with at least one other member of the family so that two of them could hold me back in case I scented an unfortunate trapper from one of the Tanana settlements around us. I could hunt alone only with Edward. He could keep up with me despite my newborn speed, and his touch calmed me instantly.

Okay, "calmed me" is a big lie. His touch when we hunted sent me into a different kind of frenzy, the kind that left spruces stripped of their bark and us stripped of our clothes. I was getting the hang of manipulating books and doorknobs and hairbrushes without destroying them. And holding John Charles just seemed natural even though I didn't remember ever cuddling a baby when I was human. But learning how to handle Edward had proved impossible.

I felt like an awkward brute with him, pushing too hard, clumsy on his skin, uneasy in my own, like a 14-year-old boy who desperately wanted to kiss and didn't know how: when Edward had put his mouth on me in the shower, I had to beg him to stop, just like the first time when I was human. My head pushed against the shower wall at the overload of sensation, just as it had when I was human.

This time, though, my head broke through the tile and stone.

It was as if the last four months learning my husband's body had never happened. I wondered in frustration if it was this hard for every newborn to be with her mate, but instead of reassuring me that I was better than normal, as Jasper always did, Edward said thoughtfully, "You are having a difficult time."

"Really?" I said in a small voice. I turned to stare out our bedroom window to hide my hurt. In the snow two stories below, I could see fresh footprints: Emmett's, Irina's smaller ones, and the tiny ones of John Charles, heading into the woods.

'Bella, love, please," he said gently. He stepped behind me, and I clenched my hands into fists so I wouldn't touch him. He sighed and gripped my fists tightly, imprisoning them. It felt both soothing and arousing, because, dammit, every one of his touches now was arousing.

"You may not remember my telling you this, but it's usually a year or so before a newborn can think about anything besides his thirst," he went on. "You have extraordinary control for your age – that you can even think about anything besides that is remarkable. That you can have this conversation with me is remarkable. You're just having a difficult time for someone with your level of control for everything else. As for being with me … you're dealing with unique circumstances. None of us had the experience of being intimate with our mate before changing. I think that even if you don't consciously recall how you touched me before, your body does, and it's exerting the same force it remembers using."

"I was that rough on you before?" I asked, scoffing.

"Of course not." I could hear the smile in his voice. "It's that the same force back then has a much, much bigger effect now. Though at the end you were quite strong with me, for a human. I thought it was confidence that you couldn't hurt me, but in hindsight, I wonder if that was your vampire strength showing."

"That makes sense."

"What I say usually does," he said lightly. "But something you did to me once … I was thinking there was something I wanted to try."

"_You_ wanted to try?" I said, twisting around to look at him.

"_We_ would want to try," he amended before adding, his voice charged, "Undress and lie down."

I moaned a little before my uncertainties caught up with me. "On the … bed?" I asked, worried about its longevity. We hadn't managed to make it to the bed yet.

"On the bed. It'll be fine." He kissed the top of my head, the contact so innocent on the surface making my insides coil. "But whenever you want to break the bed on purpose I'll be happy to help."

One second and a ruined dress and pair of laced-up blue silk knickers later, I was on the bed and Edward had disappeared into a closet. "Close your eyes, sweetheart," he murmured from inside. "Just hear, and feel."

I did as he said, and I could hear the soft noises of the other couples in the house taking advantage of John Charles's absence to vigorously enjoy each other's company. I had once feared that I would find the ability to hear such sounds disturbing, but now I found it comforting, almost like white noise that would be swallowed up by our own sighs and moans. And I knew that the others were similarly unruffled by my and Edward's contribution to the susurrus of sex.

"Beautiful," he breathed out, suddenly by my side, then paused a beat. "Hmm. I would have liked to have taken that lingerie off you. Are there more like that?"

"I'm sure there will be now," I murmured, trying to identify the smells wafting around me. Edward's scent was unimpeded by clothes, but it was mixed with the odors of oil and iron. Iron?

And so I discovered whom the chains were for. They were for me.

"Relax, put your hands above your head, and tell yourself that you can't move," he told me. Metal landed on my skin and I flinched reflexively. "Are you cold?" he teased me, adjusting the heavy links on my body as he wanted them, wrapping them around my wrists and ankles, draping them on my torso.

"I still have that human reaction, I guess," I said, "but right now, ah, I'm reacting to you….Is that an infinity symbol you're making around my tits?"

"Mmmm. Appropriate, don't you think?"

"You're kinda geeky sometimes….Ah!" My back arched off the bed as his lips suddenly brushed a nipple. There was a thump as he landed on the floor, bits of parquet scattering.

"I'm sorry," I wailed. "Are you okay?"

"I'm better than okay," he said, and even in my distress, I couldn't help but smile at his beautiful laugh; Carlisle had told me that he had heard Edward laugh more in the days since my change than in all the decades since his own.

Edward climbed on top of me, and I convulsed involuntarily at the contact of his bare skin with mine. "Don't move, just feel," he told me, and kissed my eyelids closed again. "You've called me a geek before, you know."

"Remind me?" I asked. I had a murky recollection of this, but I always wanted him to make my memory sharper.

"It was when we were driving to Chicago. There was a roadside motel in South Dakota, and we took one of the cabins that had been baking in the heat. We were surrounded by dreaming oil workers. And soon you were drenched all over. Just as you are now," he said, reaching down to stroke my sex with his hand. "So wet. So ready for me. Just like then."

I moaned again, but didn't buck him off. "Good girl," he said, and his lips found my nipple once more as a reward. I worked very hard then at staying as still as possible, because as Edward had said, vampire bodies are extremely sensitive. And what he was doing to me was causing sensations that I'd never had before.

"Edward, that feels so, so …God!" I moaned and opened my eyes again as his tongue flicked out in a circle. "Don't stop."

He looked up at me sharply, but kept his lips on my breast. "Where are you feeling it, love?"

"_Everywhere_."

"Here?" he asked, stroking my sex again

"Yes. _Don't stop_."

But he moved his hands away, bringing his wet middle finger to tap against my lips. Painfully aware that I could hurt him, I sucked it in carefully –it was the closest I'd come to having his cock in my mouth for awhile - and tasted myself mixed with him. His groan against the curve of my breast spiraled in my belly, and then his lips on one nipple and fingers on the other made me realize –

"Oh, oh," I gasped, "I didn't know, I didn't know …" I keened as my climax prickled my skin, and metal groaned when I gripped the links to channel my need to move.

"Are you okay?" he asked after a moment. He looked very pleased with himself.

"God, Edward, I didn't know I could do that! Is that norm—"

He stopped my words with a long, grown-up kiss. "At this point, don't you think you should stop worrying about what's normal?" he said afterward.

"Well, did _you _know?"

"Oh, I hoped," he answered before kissing his way down my body and settling between my legs with a gentle nip on my hipbone. I shifted uneasily.

"Edward, I'm not sure I can – "

"I am," he interrupted me. "Just remember, you can't move and you can't touch me. Because, you may not have noticed, you're_ chained up_."

His words jarred loose a memory. "I did this to you, didn't I?" I asked.

"You did, with flimsy little ropes," he said.

"And you liked it?"

"Very much. I didn't have to think about being careful for a while. So don't think at all right now. Just feel."

I hissed loudly as his breath spread on my clit, and then, my God, his _mouth _…. I screwed my eyes shut and hung on for dear life, just feeling, as he ordered, as he worked his magic with lips and tongue and teeth, reminding myself that I used to be able to do this, to absorb the pleasure I craved and not hide from it. I willed myself to give him this, to do this for him.

Of course, if my cloudy memory served, I was doing it for me too.

A curl of his tongue around my clit pushed me into overdrive. "It's there," I cried out. "Right there, Edward, please …."

Holy fuck, my cloudy memory did not serve. I was defenseless against the shudders that rocked me, and then in a flash he was above me, _in me_, and my climax continued around him. His hand wrapped around my hair and pulled, and it felt so right but so novel that I realized it was a sensual pleasure that he would not have allowed himself with human Bella.

"Harder, baby," I told him we moved. "It can be even harder now."

His growl would have shamed a mountain lion then as he thrust harder, and pulled harder, before he came. Something in the bed cracked underneath us, and the mattress slumped, tumbling us to the floor in a tangle of metal, making us laugh helplessly.

"Hah! That wasn't my fault," I told him when we had calmed down.

"To the contrary," he said, yanking aside the chains and rolling us so that I was on top of him, "it was entirely your fault that I did that."

"Oh, if you put it that way, sure," I jokingly conceded. "I still sorta can't believe I tied you up."

"You definitely did. It's one of my fondest memories," Edward said, but then he seemed to reconsider. "Oh, hell, all our times together are my fondest memories."

I grinned at him. "Just for that," I said, and let the undulation of my hips say the rest for me.

"God, yes," he groaned, ready again for me, and gripped my thighs with a strength he never would have dared before as I moved over him with increasing force, his words measuring my thrusts, telling me how hard to go for his pleasure, as my words had once told him.

"Yes," he told me again. "Yes."

And yes again and again, until I was perfect for him, as he had been perfect for me.

"When you're ready," he said, his voice roughening as our climaxes neared, "we'll re-enact every time we made love – every time we _fucked _– when you were human. I want you to remember it as well as I do."

* * *

Edward had made a recording of me talking, unawares, so that between bouts of newborn distraction I could learn to imitate my old voice. I telephoned my parents a few more times "from Russia," telling them of our imminent journey to Kazakhstan, setting the stage for my fatal car accident in a country that would be extraordinarily difficult for them to travel to or get information from, and wishing I could still cry each time I talked to them. At least I was able to tell them the things I would have regretted never telling them – to thank them, to assure them I loved them, to convince them I was happy.

We waited two months for the news that the body of a young Russian brunette, an unidentified victim of a gruesome hit-and-run, was waiting unclaimed in the Almaty morgue.

Alice told me that nearly all of Forks High came to my funeral, including freshmen who couldn't have possibly known me and Edward even by sight but were eager to skip class, while our former classmates now at Udub and Wazzu and Evergreen State drove in. Billy and Sue came to support Charlie, as did Leah, Seth and Jacob, though Jasper had to hiss at the wolves when their eye-rolling got too blatant.

Jacob declined to speak at the service in Pastor Weber's church, so it was left to Jessica to reminisce unconvincingly about what a lovely couple Edward and I were, and to speculate with more feeling about how devastated, lonely and in need of comfort he must be now. Alice emitted a loud sob at this that flustered Jessica enough that she hurriedly ended her eulogy and yielded the lectern to Angela.

Alice, Jasper and Tanya, who needed to be able to tell Lonnie about the funeral, were the only Cullen representatives there; the rest were ostensibly at Edward's bedside in the Almaty City Hospital. But the Cullen family lawyer made his obligatory appearance; Renee and Charlie were shocked by the numbers that Jenks murmured to them as he went over my will with them.

My parents were shocked again, and hurt, that I'd willed all my personal effects to Alice. It was painful but necessary, she told me; she'd left my parents some childhood artwork and baby pictures, but no photographs of post-braces Bella.

She'd confiscated brushes, combs, locks of baby hair, anything that could be used to test the stranger's corpse under my gravestone, and all my clothes too, then dumped them at a Goodwill in Seattle. I'd glared at her, but she'd glared back at my chest until I gave up. Because, yes, my cup runneth over. More accurately, my cups: my beautiful new bras from Paris were no longer able to contain my bigger though thankfully-not-Pamela- Anderson-sized post-pregnancy bosom.

Edward didn't seem to mind, though.

It would be quite a while before I'd be ready to handle a new measurement session with Mme Coigny. In any case, I had much more delicate mission in Europe to undertake that involved packing my least favorite wedding present. (I have to admit to giggling when Carlisle speculated that the big-ass vampire-cooties blood diamond from Aro was one of the jewels lost in 1216 by King John in … the Wash. The British are such jokesters.)

We'd held off as long as possible, but Eleazar was certain that Aro was restlessly awaiting word on my conversion. Finally an Alice vision confirmed that he was planning to visit – and his knowledge of our son would give him an excuse to coerce us into joining him. We all knew I had to see Aro by myself to keep John Charles's existence a secret, but it took Edward a while to accept it, even with Alice to pick the safest time for a visit.

School was out in La Push, and Jacob and Leah agreed to take John Charles, all of them safe from Demetri's tracking skills in case something went horribly wrong in Italy.

After a much-too-long car ride in which Emmett taught my son an old Joe Jackson song _- "__Wouldn't be a drag to be like you/Settling down and having kids/and telling them what to do/ Well, I'm gonna stay 19 forever"_ –he, Rosalie and I made the transfer in a berry field in northern Washington that was so redolent of chemicals that it would be impossible even for a vampire to sniff out a trail. We handed over a messenger bag filled with cash, newly minted IDs and credit cards with matching fake names, and the three left for a destination unknown to us. But not before John Charles jumped into my arms and whispered, "Knock 'em dead, Mom."

_I wish I could, sweetie_, I thought.

* * *

"Isabella, what an unexpected pleasure."

"Aro, I hope I'm not disturbing you. Carlisle sends his regards."

"You are always welcome, Isabella. Caius will be so upset to have missed you. I must say, immortality becomes you most extraordinarily. It's as if you were designed for this life."

"Thank you, Aro. And thank you for the wedding gift. It is beautiful and very, very generous of you."

"I thought the stone would complement your new face, and it does." _Pause._ "I was becoming so impatient to see if I was right that I beginning to wonder if I needed to call upon you."

"We thought we'd spare you the journey. It seemed prudent, considering our lifestyle ..."

"Certainly. Though I am disappointed that Edward did not accompany you."

"We've been married such a short time that he isn't ready to share all the details with you."

"I would never intrude without permission." _Liar._ "Please assure Edward of that."

"I will tell him."

_Pause._

"So, Isabella … you will forgive my bluntness if I ask if you noticed any other changes besides the usual?"

"I was hoping to be able to shoot lightning bolts from my eyes, but no such luck."

"We are more subtle than that."

"That's what Edward tells me, too."

"Am I right in assuming that you remain impervious to Edward's talent?"

"Yes."

"And mine?"

"There's only one way to find out."

_Pause. Sigh._

"Isabella, you remain a mystery to me." _Thank God._ "And to Jane? May we experiment? It's your choice, of course."

_Alice said I had to do this._ "No problem."

_Pause. Foot stomp. Oh, thank God._

"Jane, don't pout, it's so unattractive. This is no more than we should have expected. Isabella, excuse my curiosity, but does dear Alice continue to see your future?"

"Oh, yes." _When I'm not carrying a child who blocks her vision._ "I haven't discovered any skills that I didn't have before. " _Not a lie: Eleazar says my talent is just an intensification of what I had a human._

"Pity. You will do me the kindness of letting me know if you do?"

"Of course." _Now that _is_ a lie. "_Aro, it's nearly dawn. It would be best for all of us if I left Volterra before your human neighbors are out on the streets."

_Long, considering pause. Alice, please be right._

"Ah, sadly, you are correct. Do give my warm wishes to Carlisle, and I hope you and Edward will visit again soon."

"Carlisle will be so pleased, Aro. Thank you."

* * *

I'd earned 3 A's for fall quarter at Dartmouth, but an incomplete in Art History 101. Fortunately Edward was up for the task of completing my art history education, even when it involved bribery. The night after I left Volterra, Edward made me come, as he had once promised, in front of both a bare-breasted goddess and a worldly pope at the Doria Pamphilij museum in Rome, the moonlight pouring onto our bodies through the windows of the palazzo's arcaded galleries. And I returned the favor, because he too had been given an incomplete.

It was the only museum I'd see for a while, since the only museums that were safe for me to visit were empty of human visitors. As it was, their lingering scents fueled my desire, bloodlust sublimated into lust. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, as Carlisle had said, and Venus and the not-so-innocent Innocent X didn't disagree.

We returned home to find John Charles sporting a child-sized Motörhead T-shirt ("Prius, what are you wearing?" Alice moaned. "You look as if you were being raised by wolves, not just going on vacation with them.") and faintly tanned. Jake and Leah had chosen their destination well: they'd taken John Charles to Hawaii, where they could indulge our son in something he'd never be able to do with his real parents - play on a public beach in the sun. Leah had to promise him, though, that she'd take him back to surf when he looked old enough for it to be socially acceptable.

The trip to Hawaii had done more than just give John Charles a yen to surf: Jake and Leah were now a couple. That surprised me enough that I interrogated Jake about it when he and Edward and I were out hunting with Prius in the late spring Alaskan twilight. Or rather, Jake and Prius were hunting – Jake's odor put Edward and me off our feed.

"Why would Leah want to be with you?" I asked him as we loped through the spruces some distance behind my son and my husband. I could hear a faint laugh from Edward at my question.

"Because of my overwhelming awesomeness," Jake answered with a huge grin, knowing that Edward was listening to us.

"Of course," I said, rolling my eyes. "No, really. Isn't she worried about a repeat of what happened with Sam?"

"Yeah, she is," he said, growing serious. "And, you know, I have to worry about it too. Maybe she could imprint just like me. And at this point we're obviously not going to imprint on each other. But … I'm kinda happy about it, too. I have a _choice_: I've chosen to be with her, and she's chosen to be with me. It's a real adult relationship, not like my old packmates have - they're lopsided, you know? The wolf worshiping his woman. Leah and I, we both have to make an effort. We're equals."

I smiled at him then, because what he wanted was what I had finally gotten with Edward, and because Jake had changed a lot in the last few months. Maybe Sue's shitty self-help book had had more of an influence on him than he would have ever admitted.

He sounded as adult as his body looked now. And probably one day, he would be more of an adult than I ever would be.

"I hope you guys are happy," I said, "for a long time."

"Or for as long as she'll have me," he said.

"Jake!" John Charles called to him. "Caribou!"

"Gimme a sec to change," he called back. He turned to me and moved his index finger in a circle to indicate that I should turn my back. "You don't get to ogle me anymore. I'm taken."

Ugh. I couldn't believe that I had once kissed this man. This time my and Edward's snorts were loud enough for even humans to hear.

* * *

The Sioux or the Igbo or Hillary Clinton might say that it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a vampire commune to raise a hybrid, with an assist from friendly wolves. Because newborn vampires are pretty crappy mothers, what with all the bloodlust and distraction and irrationality, and under the usual childless newborn circumstances I would have happily disappeared into the woods with Edward for weeks at a time.

But then we would miss John Charles's bedtime.

And John Charles was incredible, as any child of Edward's would have to be. His passage through the various irritating stages of childhood was so swift that we were almost sorry when they ended; the rest of the time he was so supernaturally charming that I had to wonder if Tanya's mere proximity when he was in utero had had an effect on him. And as rapid as his physical growth was, it was far outstripped by his brain's.

You would think that the constant attention and adoration he received would have made him a spoiled brat, but knowing that we were all in his thrall was tempered by the reality that he was slower and weaker than everyone else in his family. That's one reason I was glad the wolves visited frequently; spending time with creatures who were near the same strength and speed as he was good for him.

All of us loved him, but we also envied him. We envied him his warmth, his ability to go into the sun without worry, to sleep, to eat human food without gagging. Edward and I also envied him his talents: John Charles had, we gradually discovered, inherited ours – he could read minds as well as keep his own mind from being read. But his talents were … maybe the right phrase wasn't "less powerful," but "more controllable" – he could turn off the mind-reading (and he quickly learned that in a house full of vampires, that was wisest) and he could open his mind to Edward (but he rarely did).

Alice and Jasper's discovery of a vampire-human hybrid in the Amazon was a great relief – Nahuel's apparent immortality soothed our most immediate fear. But the knowledge that John Charles would stop aging at the end of puberty gave us a new kind of deadline: since we weren't sure how plastic his brain or his personality would remain then, we were frantic about exposing him to as much as we possibly could. The idea that he could be formed forever in only four years was horrifying. Carlisle and his precocious sagacity aside, we were acutely aware of what we were lacking for having been frozen at 17 or 20 or even 26.

Our house became the most unusual home school never registered with a state education department. Once John Charles taught himself to read, we started lessons: Emmett taught ancient Greek and Hebrew, Carlisle did Latin, Kate and Irina Russian and Carmen and Eleazar Spanish. Esme taught him how to draw, Rosalie how to fix anything, Jasper how to forge anything. The wolves taught him how to track and overcome prey with techniques that vampires didn't need. Alice was his math tutor, Edward, of course, his music instructor.

And I taught him how to cook. There was still someone I loved who could use my cooking.

I sat in on many of John Charles's sessions – my shaky human knowledge of higher math had been wiped away with my change, and my Spanish hadn't been so hot either – but there was too much discussion of blood in Carlisle's biology lessons for me to be comfortable, and even with an eight-track mind I couldn't manage to look at and listen to Edward and concentrate on not breaking the piano keys.

Travel was a big part of the curriculum. It wasn't entirely for John Charles's benefit: the trips allowed the couples who would have wanted children - Esme and Carlisle, Rosalie and Emmett, and Carmen and Eleazar - to pretend to be parents for a short time. But the main goal was to let our rapidly growing child taste things, see things, hear things that he couldn't in the middle of the wilderness, and to practice lying: he had a different identity for each trip abroad, just in case the Volturi were tracking us.

It was more than a year before I felt ready to venture again to New York. The three of us chartered a plane with Esme and Carlisle, and stayed at the usual suite in the Carlyle. John Charles wanted to see the revival of "Arcadia," and hisses of surprise from our fellow audience members accompanied us as we made our way to our seats.

"What are those people thinking, bringing an 8-year-old to this? He'll hate it and disturb the rest of us," a woman four rows back complained to her companion, then went on to speculate about which of the four of us were the irresponsible parents.

But Prius loved Stoppard's convoluted banter, and when one character described how Newton's second law meant that everything in the universe would one day be at "room temperature" - that is, dead - he carefully nudged me in the ribs.

"That's you guys already," he whispered. "You're always room temperature."

"Smartass," I whispered back, and then turned to cut my eyes at Edward.

"That must come from your side of the family," he protested. I giggled, but then it occurred to me that Stoppard and Newton were wrong about heat always dissipating into cold: Edward and I had somehow made a remarkably, eternally, warm creature.

We were both eager to see Prius's reaction to the Ricciardi vampire painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the next day found us in the empty second-floor gallery of Italian Renaissance art in which it hung. With my vampire eyes I could see the precision and complexity that I had missed with my human vision, every stitch of every hunter's doublet, every muscle of every horse. Unlike every other painting in the room, it wasn't protected by a box of infrared light, the museum's security measure – Jean-François's stipulation for the sale, Edward told us, so vampires could view it without distraction.

"It's wonderful," Prius told Edward, who smirked at me before complimenting him, "That's my boy."

I raised my eyebrow at Edward – the change had given me the ability to do that, and I took advantage of it at every opportunity. "Sweetie," I said to Prius, and drew his attention to the Lippi, the faded painting of the stern young woman in a red robe that I had defended to Edward on my previous visit. "What do you think of this one?"

"That's wonderful, too," he said after a while, "even if the colors haven't lasted."

"That's my boy," I said exultantly, as Edward groaned.

"Bella," he said, "don't _you_ see how superior the Ricciardi is?"

I shrugged, enjoying the chance to tease him. "It still leaves me cold," I said.

Prius, at least, thought that hilarious.

* * *

Tanya floated in and out of our lives. She lived in my and Edward's old house in Hanover to take advantage of our, as she put it, "enhancements," for warming up with Lonnie. Tanya was supposedly working on her thesis for her degree in international relations at Boston University, a cover story that allowed her to visit us frequently, and put an expiration date on her relationship.

They broke up in the spring of Lonnie's senior year at Dartmouth. It was all timed so that a sweet Russian history major who had long pined for Lonnie could make her move, because Tanya, even if she did not fall in love with her lovers and never made them promises of forever, did not like to leave them bereft. Tanya came home just after the breakup, having told Lonnie that she had a fellowship – from the Northwest Pacific Trust, naturally – that would keep her in eastern Russia for a while.

That spring would have also been my last quarter at Dartmouth as well, but what was more important was that it signaled the end of Prius's home schooling. In the fall, he would be a plausible high school student, and would enroll in 10th grade in Fairbanks as John Charles Masen, living with his young aunt, Esme Platt, and her husband, Dr. Platt, the handsome new addition to Fairbanks Memorial.

It would sound like business as usual for the Cullens, but it wasn't: Prius was going to be navigating his first time in high school on his own, without a gaggle of pale foster siblings in quasi-incestuous relationships, without his own parents hovering. He would have to make his own friends, deflect inconvenient questions on his own.

Carlisle would be close by, and Alice foresaw that there would be an opening in the school office that Esme would fill – "Thank goodness, it's not a job as a lunch lady," Esme said with a shudder - but the rest of us wouldn't be in the picture.

Prius's potential love life had also been a matter of much debate in the family, despite my protests. "Guys, he's not even 4!" I complained when we gathered one night after he'd gone to sleep.

"He's not your little boy anymore, Mom," Jasper told me. "Physically, he's a full-fledged adolescent."

Emmett suggested that we track down Nahuel's sisters and see which one Prius liked best. "That sounds like a supremely unpleasant reality TV show," Edward said, going on to argue vociferously against any interference.

"I speak from experience," he reminded his mutinous siblings. "You should have learned by now that you shouldn't set up someone who doesn't want to be set up."

"Besides, perhaps Prius would prefer Nahuel," Carmen pointed out, reasonably.

But her remark was met with roars of laughter from Jasper and Emmett.

"I assure you, Prius would have no interest in Nahuel," Emmett smirked. "We've talked."

Edward looked appalled. "I don't want to know what advice Emmett's given Prius, do I?" I whispered to him.

"You really don't."

Tanya was unusually quiet during this conversation, and I found out why the next day when she asked me to go for a run with her.

"I've fallen for Prius," she said suddenly once we were several miles from the house.

I stopped so abruptly that Tanya was five football fields away before she realized she'd left me behind and doubled back, swift steps barely crunching through the snow.

"I'm sorry," she said as I gaped at her, almost as surprised by her unease and embarrassment as by her confession. "You don't approve."

"Well," I said after I finally got my voice back, "it's not you… well, it is you….Argh. It's like this: You'll be together, and Prius will be blissfully happy for two or three years until you're tired of him, and then … we'll all still be family. I know your lovers forgive you, but I don't know if Edward and I would. It will be uncomfortable at best."

"No, you don't understand," Tanya said, sounding upset. "I've fallen in love with him."

Tanya had said she had never fallen in love, I remembered.

"Are you sure?" I asked. "How do you know?"

"I've had a lot of relationships, you know, " she answered, now visibly hurt. "I never felt this way before."

I drew in a sharp inhale at her words. "Oh, crap, Tanya, I'm so sorry," I breathed out. "You have to leave. John Charles … he needs to go to high school, to go on dates … he needs to have crushes …"

"You were 17 when you met Edward," she argued, but half-heartedly.

"And I had actually _lived _17 years, not three and a half. You know this."

"I know," she whispered.

We were silent for a while, statues in the white forest. "What will you do?" I asked.

"I'll go to our house in Slovakia and live like a nun," she said bitterly. "A celibate nun. A celibate, abstinent nun. A celibate, abstinent, redundant nun."

"I'm so sorry," I said again.

"It'll be worth it," Tanya said, more firmly this time. "But if Prius does develop a … crush, don't tell me about it. For the first time in a thousand years, I'll be waiting and wondering if a boy likes me."

"How can he not?" I told her. Really, how could he not? I thought, before I remembered the vampire turned young who had done just that. The reminder strengthened my resolve that Prius get all the growth he could before he became unchangeable.

"But he has to go through high school first," I told her gently. "And then, he'll be able to decide for himself."

* * *

It's three years later, and now Prius is on the verge of graduating. His face has lost the last bit of baby fat, and he's as tall as his father now, and just as handsome, though in a much more approachable, _more human,_ way. When the three of us are together in public, people surmise that he's my slightly older brother, or Edward's, but then reject the notion because they unconsciously sense that we're different creatures.

Edward's hands on me make sure that they never think that he and I are siblings.

We've had only long-distance contact with Tanya for all those years, and Prius has – wistfully, I think - asked a few times why. Edward and I are the only ones who know the truth, and we simply tell him that she needs some time to herself. He has to content himself with that since he can't read my mind and he's too squeamish to read his father's.

Prius has refused to develop a romantic interest in his classmates, arguing that there is no point since he can't have an honest relationship with them. But he has good-naturedly allowed us to live vicariously through him in other ways: he's joined clubs, played piano for the school musical, gone to dances, smoked - it'd had no effect on him either. He's even asked a girl to prom, his one concession to dating. A funny, studious senior who, Prius's mind-reading allowed him to discover, is waiting until she gets far, far away from Fairbanks to come out.

"She knows we'll ever be only friends," he explained to us. "There won't be any awkwardness."

"What does she think of you?" Edward asked.

"She thinks I'm secretly gay too."

"Like father, like son," I said, and Edward gave me a dirty look. "Come on, in how many schools have people thought you were gay?"

"All of them," he conceded.

Prius has asked us to join him for college, confessing to missing our company at school, and we've made arrangements to enroll at Trinity College in cloudy Dublin. But Tanya is coming for Prius's graduation, and that meeting could change everything, Edward and I know.

For the moment, though, Prius is on his senior class trip to, of all places, Disneyland, poor thing, to wait in long lines under the California sun for rides that could never scare him or thrill him. And Edward and I are headed to Isle Esme.

By now nearly all the times I made love with Edward as a human are clearly etched in my mind because he has re-enacted them with me or simply described them to me, his actions a delicious adjunct to his words. But there is one left, perhaps the one that is the most important for both of us to relive - for me to remember, for him to atone for. Or as I see it, to forgive himself for.

"It won't quite be the same without the fear that I'll drain you dry," he says wryly as the boat nears the island's modest pier, the moon whitening the wood planks.

"You know I never worried about that," I say.

"I'm talking about me."

"Ah. _That_ I comprehend much better now than I did then."

The boat docks. He pulls me into his arms and lands us silently on the pier. We're beginning.

Last time, he's told me, my heart was hammering nervously as we entered the house and made our silent way to the bedroom This time my heart is silent and all I feel is anticipation.

Edward sets me on my feet and leaves to retrieve our luggage. The room is just as it was when we were here last time, Edward says, with the exception of the battered bed. But its replacement is big, and dressed with white sheets, and hung with mosquito netting, just like last time.

He returns, and we say our lines, and he wipes a remembered drop of perspiration off my neck. Unlike last time, I am not sweaty, and his finger feels the same temperature as me. Like last time, I am sure, his touch leaves a trail of fire on my skin.

"Don't take too long, Mrs. Cullen," he says before he heads to the ocean, pulling off his shirt as I gawk, and I head to the bathroom.

He had heard everything I had done in there, delaying in my nervousness by showering and brushing my teeth, giving myself a pep talk as he waited in an agony of impatience and anxiety for me to join him. I turn off the lights we don't need and finally leave the house, hanging my towel on the tree next to his clothes, and cut through the warm water to his side.

My hand on his chest makes him shudder, just like last time. "We belong together," I tell him.

"Forever," he says, and this time, it really is forever. I will never forget this.

We move into deeper water. He now longer needs to support my weight, or keep me from floating away, but he still curves his hand under my bottom as I wrap my legs around his waist. The dip and rise of the ocean hides my breasts, then reveals them, and he groans at the sight.

"You're so beautiful," he murmurs.

"And you are … incredible," I say, because it's just as true now as it was then.

My exploration of him is clumsy, his of me is tentative, and it doesn't matter, because we are whimpering and trembling anyway. His erection rubs on my ass, and the knowledge that I could now slide easily down his length even in the water is so damn tempting … As if he can read my mind, he pinches me with a force he never would have used on human Bella, and I behave.

"Inside, please," I request timidly. The hard flesh beneath me twitches at the double entendre that human Bella didn't realize she was making.

This time I don't have to close my eyes when Edward speeds me back to the house. We dry each other off and I shyly take his hand and tug him over to the bed. The moon is still strong, and the white linens are bright.

"Please." It's all I'm capable of saying, it seems. Edward lifts me and rolls us onto the bed, and finally I have the full length of my body pressed against his as he covers me. His flesh quivers under the light pressure of my fingertips, a reaction I wouldn't have been able to feel last time. Our kisses are closed-mouthed, and his lips on my skin are dry as they wander on my jaw, my neck, my throat, my collarbone …thank God, on the swells of my breasts … the nipples … and I am becoming much more worked up than I should be in this role… but it can't be helped …until Edward pulls his mouth away. I whimper, but he pacifies me by slipping his hand between my legs.

"Is that okay?" he asks as if he truly doesn't know the answer, and I nod frantically. He takes a deep breath, and groans, and this time I too can smell my arousal. His fingers on my wet flesh are exploratory at first but soon become confident, and I know I'm going to climax.

"Edward, I –" I start to protest, but Edward shakes his head.

"Please," he says.

And my orgasm takes me. I know the wonder in his eyes is as fresh as it was the first time he watched me.

He glides up my body and gathers me in his arms, and gathers himself.

"Please," I tell him after a moment.

He lifts his head and stares at me. "You promise to tell me," he says.

"I promise."

My legs open for him, and his thrust in is both thrilling and excruciatingly slow. His teeth grind together.

"It's okay," I reassure him. But then he taps my shoulder for my cue, and I flinch and open my eyes as his push becomes briefly uncomfortable - or it did then. He pauses, and we remain still for a moment. He's trembling, and I'm tempted to prolong the torture to tease him, but instead I charitably repeat, "It's okay."

Once he's fully in, we start to move together, harder and faster as the time flies by us, until we come to the point where Edward thinks he lost it. His thrusts become too hard for me and I gasp, and he curses and slows. But his hands still grip my hips, my thighs, they push my arms above my head to lengthen my torso, all efforts to control himself by controlling me. Even so, my mortal version would have been too distracted to observe any roughness because his movements and his moans of desire, of lust, his thumb working between us, would have obliterated any other sensations.

"Edward, I ... God…" I have enough presence of mind to try to warn him.

"I feel you, Bella, I know," he groans, and I let go with a sharp cry, and so does he.

He buries his face in my neck as I breathe heavily, but finally he pulls back from me. I groan in slight discomfort, and he leaves the bed. The water runs in the bathroom, and he returns in a few minutes with a wet cloth.

I assure him again that I'm fine as I snuggle into him, and he murmurs an "I love you" in my hair.

"Love you too," I yawn, and promptly fall asleep.

My attempt at a delicate snore makes him snigger, and I snap open my eyes and glare at him. He props himself on his elbows as I sit up.

"That was it?" I ask incredulously.

There is a flash of surprise, then puzzlement, on his face. "You're … disappointed?"

"No, I loved it, but that's not I'm saying. _That_ was what that whole emo self-loathing was about? _That_ was why I had sex dreams on my honeymoon instead of actual sex?"

"Yes."

"That was the exact amount of pressure you used with me our first time, right?''

"Of course."

"Edward, it was a C or a D on the Cullen Scale of Vampiric Sexual Response, that pressure. I would have barely felt it as a human. In fact, considering everything else I would have been feeling, I'm sure I didn't notice it at all."

"But your bruises – "

I weave my hand into his hair and tug at it a bit. "I bruised at the slightest contact back then," I reminded him. "You saw me bruised all the time as a human, but you wouldn't believe me when I told you that being marked had no relation to pain. And then, after the first time you wouldn't let yourself squeeze me like that – except, near the very end, when it wouldn't have bruised me anyway."

"I never wanted to see you bruised again," he says. "We were able to come up with a technique to control my thrusts, but the bruises … I'm always going to remember them."

"I know," I agreed. "And I know you have a lot of memories you view with regret in your existence. This shouldn't be one of them."

He is silent, but he looks contemplative now.

"Please, Edward, please try to see it from my point of view," I press on. "You have nothing to feel guilty for. Promise me that you'll try?"

He exhales loudly. "I'll try. That's all I can promise."

I'll take victory where I can find it, because changing a vampire's mind is no easy thing. "Thank you," I say. "But you know, I'm pretty sure I was pissed then, and I'm pissed now." I lunge at him and press him into the mattress. "I can't believe _that's _why you deprived me of sex for a week."

I start battering him playfully – okay, a couple of my blows may be hard enough to hurt a little - and he laughs as he tries to twist away. I immobilize his waist with my thighs, and other desires come to the fore.

"I'm looking forward to seducing you into fucking me again," I purr, reminding me of the other scene we have yet to re-enact from our honeymoon. I slide down so I'm now straddling his hips and everything else there. "But let's make a new memory here first."

"Let's," he agrees, and pulls me down to him.

* * *

Our lives will never be free of worry – what the future holds for Prius we can't be sure of, even with a genuine psychic; Aro will be forever plotting to trap us in Volterra; we will always have to balance being unchanging creatures in an ever changing world. But perhaps that is for the best: a life of certainty is a life of ennui.

The most important thing is that I have Edward, and he has me, and we have Prius and our family.

The next most important is that my husband and I have eternity to discover each other. Edward tells me that while the range goes from A to Z on the Cullen Scale, the space in between the letters is infinite.

Appropriate, don't you think?

And though compared to all that it's only a minor blessing, I get a huge grin each time I remember that I never have to wait again for Edward to be warm enough.

_fin_

* * *

_A/N: I can't believe I finally finished. I bet some of you can't believe it either._

_This is it for this version of ExB and the Cullens - or what one reviewer called my "intellectual semi-hippies." But I've started another story, "The Bella Swan Scholarship Fund," which you can find on my profile. It'll be a short fic, just a few chapters (which, um, is what I planned for "Getting Warmer," not the equivalent of a 450-page book). So put me on Author Alert if you're so inclined._

_Thank you all so much for reading, reviewing, recc'ing and nominating. You've staggered me with your generosity. And those of you who've reviewed every chapter have a special place in my heart. I sent teasers out to those who reviewed the last chapter, during an FF fail, so please forgive me if it was a response fail as well._

_Also, the phenomenal solareclipses is much nicer to me than I deserve._

_We should all thank SMeyer for being a good sport and letting us do things to her characters that she would be appalled by. And the same for Mr. Price, without whom there would have been no Russian and much less smut in this story. Je t'aime plus que je peux dire._

_Housekeeping:_

_Edward recites a poem by Petrarch (with alterations for Bella):_

_Her chestnut locks were to the breezes spread/__And in a thousand ringlets they would blow/__And a soothing light did immeasurably glow/__In those fine eyes…_

_I borrowed/stole "fursplode" from Cleolinda Jones, whose summaries of the "Twilight" books and movies are some of the funniest bits of writing I've ever read._

_Art links on my profile page. Ciao!_


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